Mindful Emotion Regulation, Savouring and Proactive Behaviour: The Role of Supervisor Justice

Abstract

The global financial crisis and recession‐prompted budget cuts represent significant challenges to public sector organisations, limiting their ability to make changes to job design and increasing job demands. In such environments, primary interventions targeted at changing the job or the work are not always viable. In this research, we examine the effectiveness of a mindful emotion regulation (MER) intervention versus a “control” savouring nature (SN) intervention in terms of facilitating the investment of work engagement into proactive behaviours. We also examine how the job resource of supervisor justice impacts these relationships. We collected data from an Irish public sector organisation using a cluster randomised controlled trial design. The final sample comprised 108 participants (MER = 74; SN = 34). Results highlight the valuable role that job resources play as boundary conditions of psychological‐based interventions since the success of MER and SN depended on the participants’ perceptions of supervisor justice. When supervisor justice was high, a restorative SN exercise was effective in promoting proactive behaviours. When supervisor justice was low, a more complex cognitive and emotional exercise in the form of MER was required. We explain these results and consider their implications for future research.