Being While Doing: An Inductive Model of Mindfulness at Work

Mindfulness at work has drawn growing interest as empirical evidence increasingly supports its positive workplace impacts. Yet theory also suggests that mindfulness is a cognitive mode of “Being” that may be incompatible with the cognitive mode of “Doing” that undergirds workplace functioning. Therefore, mindfulness at work has been theorized as “being while doing,” but little is known regarding how people experience these two modes in combination, nor the influences or outcomes of this interaction. Drawing on a sample of 39 semi-structured interviews, this study explores how professionals experience being mindful at work. The relationship between Being and Doing modes demonstrated changing compatibility across individuals and experience, with two basic types of experiences and three types of transitions. We labeled experiences when informants were unable to activate Being mode while engaging Doing mode as Entanglement, and those when informants reported simultaneous co-activation of Being and Doing modes as Disentanglement. This combination was a valuable resource for offsetting important limitations of the typical reliance on the Doing cognitive mode. Overall our results have yielded an inductive model of mindfulness at work, with the core experience, outcomes, and antecedent factors unified into one system that may inform future research and practice. We did a full hour … of [mindfulness] training… My pager went off like three times. … He\u27s telling us to meditate, and everyone\u27s pager was just beeping. It was not very conducive to meditating. –medical residen

Explaining how mindfulness consistently brings positive workplace outcomes

It gives us the ability to shift gears between 'being' and 'doing' to deal with different work challenges, write Darren J. Good and Christopher J. Lydd

Environmental leadership : the discipline of green champions

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-88).Modern society's inertia is driving it towards an ever-expanding environmental footprint, a course that if unchecked will produce calamitous environmental outcomes. Avoiding this future requires increasing capacity for deep and durable change in society. Since existing approaches - e.g., science, education, policy, market incentives - have been unsuccessful at achieving this level of change, a key ingredient is apparently missing. Environmental leadership, which I define as the capacity of a human community to improve its future connection with and impact upon the environment, can be that catalyst of a more sustainable society. This thesis explores how to increase environmental leadership capacity by revealing effective environmental leadership strategy. Given pragmatic concerns with the limited power possessed by environmentalists, the inherently unstable nature of gains made through power, and unlikelihood of achieving deeper transformations through coercion, I explore leadership strategy for creating change beyond the extent of its authority and without imposing the government's coercive power. I had presumed three existing veins within leadership literature - Interpersonal Influence, Capacity-Building, and Contextual Design - would adequately explain environmental leadership strategy, with Interpersonal Influence being the primary mechanism. While leaders indeed acted in all three styles, Contextual Design instead emerged as a surprisingly key route to influence. Analysis of interviews with 32 environmental leaders revealed an important, previously underreported aspect to leadership actions. Leaders routinely amplified and institutionalized their leadership influence by designing and creating durable structures achieving four purposes - Supplying, Community-Building, Integrating, and Mirroring.(cont.) All three leadership approaches both supported and were supported by structures, which could function as supportive tools or standalone allies. I speculate that structures were effective because of both their durability and their more subtle and tangible influence on behavior, an alternative to the prediction of appeals to abstract thoughts and values. Extensive additional work exploring environmental leadership remains, and I offer some questions to guide additional research. I conclude with initial perspectives on how the notion of designer-leaders informs strategic thinking about environmental change.by Christopher Lyddy.M.C.P

Mindfulness has big impacts for performance, decision-making and career longevity

It is no longer a fad, argue Darren J. Good, Christopher J. Lyddy, Theresa M. Glomb and Joyce E. Bon

A Swiss army knife?:How science challenges our understanding of mindfulness in the workplace

While mindfulness has demonstrated many advantages in the workplace, this paper addresses important issues around the future of mindfulness at work. We begin by clarifying our understanding of mindfulness in the workplace. This is followed by a discussion on the problematic nature of mindfulness-based interventions in workplaces and potential guidance is provided for those who intend to undertake interventions. Finally, we examine how workplaces are naturalistic settings that differ in how they can nurture mindfulness in employees. Ultimately this paper provides organizations and practitioners insight into potential issues in navigating mindfulness at work, while also providing cautionary optimism around the future of mindfulness in the workplace

Contemplating Mindfulness at Work: An Integrative Review

Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management research investigating a broad range of constructs. The framework identifies how mindfulness influences attention, with downstream effects on functional domains of cognition, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Ultimately, these domains impact key workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships, and well-being. Consideration of the evidence on mindfulness at work stimulates important questions and challenges key assumptions within management science, generating an agenda for future research

Operationalizing heedful interrelating: How attending, responding, and feeling comprise coordinating and predict performance in self-managing teams

Team coordination implies a system of individual behavioral contributions occurring within a network of interpersonal relationships to achieve a collective goal. Current research on coordination has emphasized its relational aspects, but has not adequately accounted for how team members also simultaneously manage individual behavioral contributions and represent the whole system of the team’s work. In the current study, we develop theory and test how individuals manage all three aspects of coordinating through the three facets described in the theory of heedful interrelating. We operationalize the facet of contributing as distributing attention between self and others, subordinating as responsively communicating, and representing as feeling the system of the team’s work as a cohesive whole. We then test the relationships among these facets and their influence on team performance in an experiment with 50 ad hoc triads of undergraduate student self-managing teams tasked with collectively composing a song in the lab. In analyzing thin-slices of video data of these teams’ coordination, we found that teams with members displaying greater dispersion of attentional distribution and more responsive communicating experienced a stronger feeling of the team as a whole. Responsive communication also predicted team performance. Accounting for how the three aspects of coordinating are managed by individual team members provides a more critical understanding of heedful interrelating, and insight into emergent coordination processes