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

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

Feeling Heard: Experiences of Listening (or Not) at Work

Listening has been identified as a key workplace skill, important for ensuring high-quality communication, building relationships, and motivating employees. However, recent research has increasingly suggested that speaker perceptions of good listening do not necessarily align with researcher or listener conceptions of good listening. While many of the benefits of workplace listening rely on employees feeling heard, little is known about what constitutes this subjective perception. To better understand what leaves employees feeling heard or unheard, we conducted 41 interviews with bank employees, who collectively provided 81 stories about listening interactions they had experienced at work. Whereas, prior research has typically characterized listening as something that is perceived through responsive behaviors within conversation, our findings suggest conversational behaviors alone are often insufficient to distinguish between stories of feeling heard vs. feeling unheard. Instead, our interviewees felt heard or unheard only when listeners met their subjective needs and expectations. Sometimes their needs and expectations could be fulfilled through conversation alone, and other times action was required. Notably, what would be categorized objectively as good listening during an initial conversation could be later counteracted by a failure to follow-through in ways expected by the speaker. In concert, these findings contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying how listening behaviors take on meaning from the speakers\u27 perspective and the circumstances under which action is integral to feeling heard. Moreover, they point toward the various ways listeners can engage to help speakers feel heard in critical conversations

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