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

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

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

Contemplating Critique: Mindfulness Attenuates Self-Esteem and Self-Regulatory Impacts of Negative Feedback

ObjectivesReceiving feedback is vital to learning and job performance, but this can provoke undesirable psychological responses, including loss of self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. While mindfulness can attenuate responses to self-threats, it is unknown if this occurs following self-esteem threats, including negative feedback. This experimental study investigates a proposed moderated mediation model of how brief mindfulness meditation may attenuate these psychological responses to negative feedback.MethodsThe proposed model was tested through a randomized 2 × 2 factor experiment with a sample of undergraduate students (N = 163). Participants completed a performance task (the Remote Associates Test), followed by an audio guided mindfulness induction (mindfulness meditation v. mind-wandering active control). After receiving randomized performance feedback, either negative or positive feedback, participants reported their state self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. We modeled feedback as predicting self-regulatory depletion through self-esteem, and brief mindfulness meditation moderating the relationship between feedback and self-esteem, and through this influencing the indirect relationship of feedback and self-regulatory depletion.ResultsFindings provided support for the proposed moderated mediation model. Inducing mindfulness via brief meditation weakened the relationship between negative feedback and decreased self-esteem, thus contributing to lower self-regulatory depletion.ConclusionsThe results provide evidence that inducing mindfulness through meditation attenuates psychological responses to negative feedback, including loss of state self-esteem and self-regulatory depletion. This adds to understanding of the intersection of mindfulness practice, the self, and practice in educational and workplace domains

Where Mindfulness Falls Short

Today, more than half of all large companies offer their employees some form of mindfulness training — a broad set of practices and techniques focusing on increasing awareness of the here and now. But new research suggests that these programs don’t always improve people’s wellbeing or their job performance. Specifically, for employees whose roles require them to act inauthentically (such as salespeople, waiters, or customer service representatives who often have to smile through unpleasant interactions with customers), becoming more mindful of their emotions in the moment can actually have a negative effect on their mental health. Based on these findings, the authors offer four strategies to help organizations successfully implement mindfulness programs at work while limiting these negative side effects. Ultimately, the authors argue that mindfulness is an important tool in the managerial toolbox, but it is not a cure-all, and it must be applied thoughtfully to be effective