Abstract
While mindfulness has garnered increasing attention in organizations, few studies have operationalized workplace mindfulness and developed a valid measurement of this construct. Given this limitation, it is difficult to obtain a comprehensive understanding of workplace mindfulness or to promote theoretical and empirical research investigating this construct. To address this issue, the current research aims to examine the conceptualization of workplace mindfulness and seeks to develop a psychometrically sound scale assessing this construct. Based on the mindfulness literature, we propose a multidimensional model of workplace mindfulness consisting of three dimensions: awareness, attention, and acceptance. Across seven phases with six independent samples, and using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, our results provide support for the proposed multidimensional structure and reveal sound reliability and validity of the developed scale. This new instrument will be a valuable tool for both researchers and practitioners to assess employees’ mindfulness in working situations.
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Notes
To further test the convergent and discriminant validity of our scale, we collected more data to differentiate workplace mindfulness from cognitive self-awareness, the ability to focus, and experiential avoidance. Participants worked at a high-tech company located in southern China. Our results from the final sample (N = 442) showed that workplace mindfulness was only significantly related to cognitive self-awareness (r = .51, p < .001), but was not related to either the ability to focus (r = .06, p = .180) or experiential avoidance (r = .07, p = .150). In terms of the relationships between each dimension and the related constructs, we found that awareness, attention, and acceptance could be differed from those related constructs because they had moderate or small correlations. The detailed results are available upon request.
Although we focused on the overall effects of workplace mindfulness and each dimension was strongly correlated with each other, we conducted additional analysis to test the relationships between each dimension and those outcomes. The findings showed that awareness, attention, and acceptance were all significantly related to the outcomes as we expected. The detailed results are available upon request.
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This research was supported by a grant awarded to Dr. Xiaoming Zheng, Tsinghua University, funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71771133).
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Zheng, X., Ni, D., Liu, X. et al. Workplace Mindfulness: Multidimensional Model, Scale Development and Validation. J Bus Psychol 38, 777–801 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09814-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09814-2