Report: Mindfulness and Leadership's Effect on Job Performance

This report examines the impact of mindfulness on job performance within organizations, focusing on leadership behaviors and organizational implications. It defines mindfulness from Eastern and Western perspectives, highlighting its role in self-regulation, emotional intelligence, and decision-making. The report explores the relationship between mindfulness and leadership, presenting hypotheses on how mindfulness influences leadership self-mastery and organizational transformation. It also discusses the organizational benefits of mindfulness training programs, such as reduced stress and improved employee well-being, referencing examples like Google's 'Search Inside Yourself' program. The report concludes by emphasizing the positive impact of mindfulness on leadership and its potential to enhance overall job performance. The report is supported by a literature review of relevant sources.

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The purpose of this report is to analysis and defines the ways by which mindfulness
enhances the job performance in an organization.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is defined by many different authors but the common definition of mindfulness is
the state of being aware of the present reality and living in the moment. Dane defined
mindfulness as a state of consciousness in which attention is focused on present moment
phenomena occurring both internally and externally.
There are two approaches to define mindfulness construct,
1. Eastern-This approach is a result of the general agreement among scholars that
mindfulness is a state of consciousness that focuses on the present moment in a
non-judgmental manner. Hence, the two key aspects of mindfulness here is the
attention focus on the moment and the lack of evaluation due to which it is
mandatory to accept the present.
2. Western-This approach is an information-processing approach. The key aspect of
mindfulness here is drawing novel distinctions.
Hence, mindfulness can also be defined as a preferred way of thinking and acts as an
interface between personality and cognition or it can be understood as a disposition
providing an interface between knowledge and behaviour (King, 2017).
Mindfulness and leadership behaviour
With the help of structural equation modelling, the authors concluded that leadership self-
mastery and leadership organizational-transformation is related to mindfulness. Glomb et al.
described benefits of mindfulness in leadership behaviour. He defined some processes and
argued that mindfulness is linked to self-regulation by these processes. Few examples of
these processes are:
 Reduced automatic thinking
 Increased awareness of physical experiences
 Decoupling of ego to events
Mindfulness enhances self-leadership with the help of self-regulation along with emotional
intelligence and self-reflection. Mindfulness enhances leadership because mindfulness
generates awareness of current information and gives a perception to support real-time
decisions. It also enhances psychological well-being and resilience and gives presence to
interpersonal relationships (Brown, 2003). Apart from this, mindfulness also reduces stress

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and hence the brain becomes creative. Hence, mindfulness impacts the leadership
behaviour in positive manner (Malinowski, 2015). On basis of this relation between
mindfulness and leadership, the authors discovered few hypotheses,
Hypothesis 1: Mindfulness will be related to leadership self-mastery.
Hypothesis 2: Mindfulness will be related to leadership organizational-transformation.
Hypothesis 3: Leadership self-mastery will mediate the influence of mindfulness on
leadership organizational-transformation.
Hypothesis 4: Organisational tenure duration and role tenure duration influences
mindfulness on leadership self-mastery.
Hypothesis 5: Organisational tenure duration and role tenure duration also influences
mindfulness on leadership organizational-transformation.
Organisational implications
According to the authors, the organizations choose senior managers because they perform
well and hence provide maximum benefits to the organizations. These senior managers
provide mindfulness trainings to other employees and enhance leader development. Laloux
says that the mindfulness training can be given through an ethical business philosophy.
Organizations conduct the mindfulness training and development programs and works with
the practitioners, coaches and mindfulness scholars. Before implementing this training and
development programs the organizations also seek the current existing programs. The goals
of few of the existing programs are to reduce stress and decrease depression at work
(Weick, 2006).
Few organizations are having mindfulness programs like the ‘Search Inside Yourself’
program at Google and ‘Finding Space To Lead’ program at General Mills. These programs
comprises of tasks which affects the management and leadership skills in a positive manner.
Some authors also argue that it is difficult to put mindfulness programs into practice.

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References
Brown, K. & Ryan, R. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in
psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol.84, no.4,
pp.822-848.
Malinowski, P. & Lim, H. (2015). Mindfulness at Work: Positive Affect, Hope, and Optimism
Mediate the Relationship Between Dispositional Mindfulness, Work Engagement, and
Well-Being. Mindfulness, vol.6, no.6, pp.1250-1262.
King, E. & Haar, J. (2017). Mindfulness and job performance: a study of Australian leaders. Asia
Pacific Journal of Human Resources, vol. 55, no.3, pp.298-319.
Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2006). Mindfulness and the Quality of Organizational
Attention. Organization Science, vol. 17, no.4, pp.514-524.