Mindful Change: A Concept for Social Sustainability at Organizational Level

Minding less: Exploring mindfulness and mindlessness in organizations through Skillful Means

“…According to Weick and Sutcliffe (2008), mindfulness in organizations is based on five interrelated processes: preoccupation with failure, non-simplified interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. These processes are said to contribute to organizational learning by enabling the identification of errors and threats, creating multiple perspectives, providing contextualized interpretations and viewpoints, enabling attentiveness, situational awareness and tacit knowledge, stimulating the capability to analyze and learn from mistakes, and helping to deal with unexpected events (Becke, 2014). Empirical and theoretical studies of mindfulness in organizations have been carried out in worker reliability (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006; Vogus and Sutcliffe, 2012), and where operating systems require an extraordinary level of both safety and productivity in demanding conditions.…”

“…In terms of the second point, arguably, a “mindful organization” does not necessarily mean that employees at all hierarchical levels should be mindful at all times (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006). A further perceived weakness in organizational research concerning mindfulness lies in its functional and instrumental perspective (Becke, 2014). At the organizational level, mindfulness tends to concentrate on employees’ mindfulness as a function that can be utilized to serve the organization’s interest.…”

“…At the organizational level, mindfulness tends to concentrate on employees’ mindfulness as a function that can be utilized to serve the organization’s interest. This shift in focus may result in marginalizing the intrinsic wellbeing of employees, their motivation and development of their competencies (Becke, 2014), and disregarding individual differences in terms of intellectual, physical, and psychological abilities. Furthermore, empirical studies suggest that social dynamics and individual differences in organizations challenge the right interpretation of “right mindfulness,” which can result in the misuse of mindfulness practices as techniques for organizational purposes rather than an ethics-based practice (Vu and Gill, 2018).…”

“…In terms of the third point, notwithstanding the popularity of mindfulness in organizations, there are concerns about the emergence of a “mindfulness fad” (Carroll, 2006; Duerr, 2004). Studies on mindfulness as deployed in Western organizational contexts are not without debate and “blind spots” (Becke, 2014). Academic mainstream conversations on mindfulness highlight the commercialization and commodification of mindfulness in organizations in the West (Hyland, 2015; Purser and Loy, 2013).…”

“…Organizational routines can be described as a source of inertia (Hannan and Freeman, 1983), inflexibility (Gersick and Hackman, 1990), and mindlessness (Ashforth and Fried, 1988; Langer, 1989). Repetitive patterns in work routines may create “inertia and blind spots that induce unintended detrimental side-effects of organizational change” (Becke, 2014: 62).…”