Out of Context: There's More to Mindfulness at Work Than Nonjudgmental Awareness

First, the authors ignore a large body of literature highly relevant to the industrial–organizational (I-O) community. They chose to exclude from their synthesis Ellen Langer's (Reference Langer1989) pioneering work on mindfulness from the 1980s, which many management scholars and senior executives in organizations consider the origin of the current booming interest in secular mindfulness. By ignoring Langer's early literature, the authors restrict their review exclusively on individual-level phenomena in organizations and prevent the reader from gaining an understanding of workplace mindfulness as an interplay of individual and organizational level variables. This is unfortunate given they state such an objective in the article's title. A rich literature prompted by Langer's work placed mindfulness within an organizational context through the 1990s, which the authors do not review. In particular Karl Weick and colleagues (Weick & Sutcliffe, Reference Weick and Sutcliffe2006; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, Reference Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld2008) developed the idea of organizational mindfulness using a comprehensive, multilevel approach. The authors’ exclusive focus on individuals and their cognitive, affective, and physiological experiences reduces workplace mindfulness to a context-independent toolkit and fails to inform managers and management scholars why and how different levels of analysis in mindfulness are linked. By way of example, Vogus, Rothman, Sutcliffe, and Weick (Reference Vogus, Rothman, Sutcliffe and Weick2014) outline in their Journal of Organizational Behavior article how employees’ equanimity and prosocial orientation can serve as the foundation of collective levels of mindfulness.

We propose that it is essential to understand and debate mindfulness at work as a multilevel phenomenon. Only in this way can we fully address the underlying cause of the steadily increasing interest from workplaces in mindfulness, which we deem related to an ever-more complex, contradictory, and often chaotic environment in which work takes place. Mindfulness as a multilevel phenomenon represents the opportunity for people at work to accept and embrace this new reality and, through this process, generate resilience, creativity, and innovation. This is the real “so what” of mindfulness at work, and it goes well beyond instrumental mindfulness methods targeting individuals’ coping with change and enhancing their performance at work.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Compassion and Mindfulness

Second, although the authors rightly note that the bulk of workplace mindfulness research has focused on mindfulness as a cognitive process of organizing or through an efficacy lens that addresses particular individual outcomes, their aspiration of reviewing workplace mindfulness practices is not fulfilled. Clearly, the conceptualization of mindfulness in the literature over the last 20 years has evolved from cognitive processing to include attitudinal aspects like nonjudgment, yet the predominant depiction of mindfulness as presented by the authors ignores other psychological and interpersonal processes connected with mindfulness practices. One of these in particular is considered critical by many mindfulness researchers and practitioners: compassion. To be sure, the great majority of the mindfulness at work studies published and reviewed by the authors use breath meditation to operationalize mindfulness practice; however, there are many other mindfulness practices that use other attentional anchors, for example, loving-kindness and compassion meditation. The continual broad use of mindfulness to refer to different mindfulness practices and meditation altogether conflates the distinctions among these techniques. It is like using the word “Internet” to describe any and all websites. We contend that only by rigorously examining the distinctions and overlaps between extant mindfulness practices can we get to a comprehensive understanding of whether and how mindfulness may benefit employees and organizations. We argue in particular that one of the most promising applications of mindfulness in the workplace relates to compassion and occurs between people, not within individuals as the majority of the author's argument suggests. Mindfulness and compassion are intimately connected, and compassion research and interventions offer I-O researchers fertile ground to explore mindfulness in an interpersonal context, for example, team dynamics. Important to note is the need to continue clarifying the distinction between mindfulness and compassion and, further, to converge on a definition of compassion and to systematically advance its empirical study in order to explore how compassion itself impacts work outcomes. Thupten Jinpa, the founder of the Center for Compassion Training at Stanford University and a principal translator for the Dalai Lama for over 30 years, has been working toward such ends. He describes compassion in four parts in his Compassion Cultivation Training manual (Jinpa, Reference Jinpa2010): noticing suffering in another, empathizing with their experience, feeling a desire to help alleviate their suffering, and enacting behavior in an effort to help. This is highly relevant to understanding the catalytic effect of mindfulness in collective settings, as demonstrated, for example, by social neuroscientist Tania Singer and Claus Lamm (Singer & Lamm, Reference Singer and Lamm2009). The role of compassion in mindfulness research needs to be added to the workplace mindfulness discussion because it has much to offer organizational scholars interested in prosocial behavior and performance at the individual, group, and organizational level.

A to Z: But What's in the Middle?

Finally, the majority of the mindfulness research reviewed in the focal article has fixated overwhelmingly on outcomes. Although the literature review presented by the authors provides a fairly comprehensive summary of the link between mindfulness and performance outcomes, it misses the granular details that might otherwise compel those that are wary of mindfulness to believe that the purported effects of mindfulness are what researchers say they are. There are many critical details to consider when assessing and integrating the extant research on mindfulness, three of which we discuss here. First, performance-related outcomes of mindfulness are largely researched using dispositional mindfulness measures. This cross-sectional, static snapshot informs us little on how mindfulness may actually improve performance. Second, these studies rely largely on self-reported measures of mindfulness, well-being, and performance, which make them vulnerable to a long list of rater effects. Finally, many of these studies are based on laboratory experiments that lack active control groups (i.e., limiting our ability to rule out the possibility that effects are from groups of people meeting together rather than the mindfulness practice itself). Indeed, a closer look at these studies may reveal that many experiments do not include control groups at all. We need to draw attention to these issues and discuss these more openly in order to promote training partnerships between academics and workplace practitioners that are founded on the principles of rigorous research methodology. In this way, research has greater potential to generate valid and reliable answers to the questions on what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of mindfulness interventions at work really are.

Many a senior executive or critical researcher may reject mindfulness as somewhat “idle” or “irrelevant” to the issues they face at work, arguing, “So now I'm mindfully paying attention to the situation—now what?” We agree with the authors that a compelling way to engage I-O researchers and workplace practitioners is by increasing the evidence base of workplace mindfulness. By examining its mechanisms and moderators to understand how and why mindfulness is producing any effects at all, we can reliably identify contexts that will benefit from applications of mindfulness and, importantly, those that will not. Conceptualizing mindfulness as a multilevel construct, acknowledging the contemplative roots of mindfulness, and clearly specifying which aspect of mindfulness is being referred to may allow researchers to answer the question of “now what?” Such efforts may clarify to scholars and practitioners alike precisely how, when, and why mindfulness fits into workplace research and practice.