In the present research, we examine the relation between leader mindfulness and employee performance through the lenses of organizational justice and leader-member relations. We hypothesize that employees of more mindful leaders view their relations as being of higher leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. We further hypothesize two mediating mechanisms of this relation: increased interpersonal justice and reduced employee stress. In other words, we posit that employees of more mindful leaders feel treated with greater respect and experience less stress. Finally, we predict that LMX quality serves as a mediator linking leader mindfulness to employee performance-defined in terms of both in-role and extra-role performance. Across two field studies of triadic leader-employee-peer data (Study 1) and dyadic leader-employee data (Study 2), we find support for this sequential mediation model. We discuss implications for theorizing on leadership, organizational justice, business ethics, LMX, and mindfulness, as well as practical implications.

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To cope with ever-increasing work demands, people often turn to multitasking. Although it is known that multitasking harms objective task performance, we know relatively little about how multitasking influences subjective experience. In this article, we develop hypotheses about the subjective experience of multitasking. Namely, we hypothesize that people multitask more often in the presence of challenge stressors (like workload, responsibility, and time pressure), that multitasking is one of the reasons why challenge stressors produce feelings of mental fatigue, and that multitasking feels especially mentally fatiguing for people with fewer cognitive resources—as people with fewer cognitive resources paradoxically must use particularly resource-demanding self-regulation processes to multitask. Using an experience sampling design, in Study 1 (N = 248 participants; 5,191 responses), we find support for these hypotheses. Given the increasing prevalence of multitasking, we then ask what can be done to reduce its negative consequences. Drawing on recent findings that mindfulness training increases the efficacy of self-regulation, we hypothesize that mindfulness training will compensate for cognitive resources by empowering people with fewer cognitive resources to multitask without feeling mentally fatigued. Pairing experience sampling with a long-term mindfulness training, in Study 2 (N = 114 participants; 1,197 responses), we replicate our initial findings and extend them: multitasking feels mentally fatiguing for people with fewer cognitive resources in the control condition but not in the mindfulness training condition. Taken together, these findings shed new light on the interface of work design, self-regulation, and mental fatigue.

Strategic change in organizations prompts pervasive ambiguity. As change initiatives cascade down the hierarchy, they can be met with habitual, inertial responses that ultimately generate negatively charged emotions-or they can prompt novel, experimental behaviors that forestall them. What remains unclear, however, is which factors drive teams, and the leaders that guide them, toward or away from this negative emotional reaction to change. In this study, we integrate social cognitive theory and research on mindfulness to unpack collective responses to change through a field study on 88 teams in a mortgage industry firm undergoing strategic change. We theorize that, when faced with ambiguous goals, team leaders low on mindful attention will lack the necessary cognitive capabilities to enact experimental behaviors-as they neither have clear external goals from senior managers nor internal dispositions to drive their attention into noticing novel information and eliciting unscripted experimental responses. In contrast, the experimental behaviors of team leaders who are high on mindful attention will not be affected by ambiguous goals-and the experimental behaviors of team leaders, in turn, will prompt greater experimental behaviors within their team, thereby lowering the team's negative emotional reaction to change. Finding support for these hypotheses, our study contributes to research on dynamic managerial capabilities, collective responses to organizational change, and mindfulness.

When faced with a problem, how do individuals search for potential solutions? In this article, we explore the cognitive processes that lead to local search (i.e., identifying options closest to existing solutions) and distant search (i.e., identifying options of a qualitatively different nature than existing solutions). We suggest that mind wandering is likely to lead to local search because it operates by spreading activation from initial ideas to closely associated ideas. This reduces the likelihood of accessing a qualitatively different solution. However, instead of getting lost in thought, individuals can also step back and monitor their thoughts from a detached perspective. Such mindful metacognition, we suggest, is likely to lead to distant search because it redistributes activation away from initial ideas to other, less strongly associated, ideas. This hypothesis was confirmed across two studies. Thus, getting lost in thoughts is helpful when one is on the right track and needs only a local search whereas stepping back from thoughts is helpful when one needs distant search to produce a change in perspective.