Reconsidering Mindfulness in Favor of Cultural Filters when Managing for Change

Abstract

Mindfulness has garnered considerable attention in the academic and practitioner literature as a coping behavior in contexts of change and as a tool to unleash creativity and productivity. In this paper, we review the mindfulness literature in the context of change and provide important extensions to the mindfulness literature by arguing that mindfulness is helpful but is insufficient for change readiness because it fails to acknowledge the beneficial effects of historicity, familiarity, and imprinting at the individual level. As a result, mindfulness may be less realistic to manage change events effectively over time largely because cognition begins and ends from a point of distortion. Instead, we advocate that individuals’ innate understanding of change, as by-products of their culture, provide different sets of meaning through schemata, influencing exploration versus exploitation activities and work-team goals (preservation vs. transformation). To address these aspects, we introduce a new paradigm in a...