Do mindful individuals organize mindfully? Consequences for team problem-solving

Abstract

The literature on mindfulness in organizations has largely proceeded along one of two streams. The first stream emphasizes individual-level psychological states, focusing on how people attend to information and interpret it. The second stream emphasizes team-level interactions, focusing on how social interaction partners share information and adjust collective interpretations. Although these streams have historically proceeded separately, there is an increasing call for their integration in organizational mindfulness research. The present paper answers this call by hypothesizing two pathways by which individual-level mindfulness components and team-level mindful organizing may relate. The first pathway is emergent, in which the average levels and dispersion of individual mindfulness in teams influence mindful organizing as mediated by team conflict. The second pathway is contextual, in which levels of mindful organizing in teams can increase the mindfulness of its members. Across a cross-sectional field study and a longitudinal laboratory study, we found strong support for the contextual pathway, but mixed support for the emergent pathway. As such, mindful organizing was not only associated with effective problem solving, but it also predicted individual mindfulness, which was associated with greater satisfaction with team membership.