This paper evaluates the benefits of meditation in regard to emotional intelligence (EI), perceived stress and negative mental health with cross‐sectional and experimental studies. It first studied 351 full‐time working adults with different amounts of experience in meditation for these factors in order to test the hypothesis that their differences in them were based on differences in meditation experience, and found that those participants with greater meditation experience exhibited higher EI, and less perceived stress and negative mental health than those who had less or none. It then randomly divided 20 graduate students with no previous experience of meditation into a mindfulness meditation group (n = 10) and a control group (n = 10), and measured them for the same variable pre‐treatment and post‐treatment to test the hypothesis that meditation training improves people's state, and found that those who completed the mindfulness meditation training demonstrated significant improvements compared to the control group. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The objectives of this paper are to explore the effect of leadership style and job characteristics on job performance and examine the mediating effect of organization commitment on the leadership style, the job characteristics and the job performance as well as to provide the management suggestions according the research findings.The questionnaires are applied to the accountants of county/city government in Taiwan, and the convenience sampling is adopted. The following research findings are described after conducting the statistical analyses. Firstly, this research finds that the more idealized influence for the county/city mayor is, the stronger ability of problem solving for the associated accountants are. In addition, the better management by exception conducted by the mayor, the more ability of problem solving for accountants exists, and therefore the higher passion of innovation happens. Secondly, this research also reveals that the more job autonomy, job importance, and job diversity happen, the stronger ability of problem solving for the accountants are. Besides, the higher job autonomy for accountants exists, the higher passion of innovation happens. The mediating effect of organization commitment was found between transformational leadership and job performance. It indicates that organization commitment would be a mediator between transactional leadership and job performance.

It is importance to cultivate a compassionate and caring culture throughout hospitals' hierarchies, especially from the top down. Nurses will have more opportunities to experience it, witness it, or participate in it when they work within a compassionate and caring organisational culture.

Work empowerment may be an effective way to reduce counterproductive work behaviour and to enhance organisational citizenship behaviour among nurses when supervisors do not promote a healthy work environment for them.