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Addressing Unintended Ethical Challenges of Workplace Mindfulness: A Four-Stage Mindfulness Development Model

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Abstract

This study focuses on mindfulness programs in the corporate world, which are receiving increasing attention from business practitioners and organizational scholars. The workplace mindfulness literature is rapidly evolving, but most studies are oriented toward demonstrating the positive impacts of mindfulness as a state of mind. This study adopts a critical perspective to evaluate workplace mindfulness practice as a developmental process, with a focus on its potential risks that have ethical implications and are currently neglected by both researchers and practitioners. We draw from a Buddhist perspective that understands mindfulness training as an ethics-based, longitudinal, and holistic path. To this end, we develop a four-stage model to illustrate a potential developmental process for participants in workplace mindfulness programs. This model comprises four stages of preliminary concentration, deep concentration, self-transcendence, and reengagement, each of which has its own underlying characteristics and impacts on individual participants and organizations.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to participants of the sub-theme of Critical Perspectives on Corporate Mindfulness and Workplace Spirituality at the 32nd EGOS Colloquium (Naples, Italy) for their helpful advices on improving this article.

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  1. Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Jane X. J. Qiu

  2. Department of Marketing and Management, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    David Rooney

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Correspondence to Jane X. J. Qiu.

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Qiu, J.X.J., Rooney, D. Addressing Unintended Ethical Challenges of Workplace Mindfulness: A Four-Stage Mindfulness Development Model. J Bus Ethics 157, 715–730 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3693-1

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