Leading matters! Linking compassion and mindfulness in organizations through servant leadership

Regardless of where they are, humans are inherently human. In this study, we explore the relationship between compassion, mindfulness, and servant leadership contributing to an overall feeling of safety. Adopting a humanistic approach to human resource management, we examine how compassion and mindfulness intersect under the lens of the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Our investigation focuses on understanding how servant leadership facilitates the cultivation of mindfulness through compassion. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we analyze data gathered from 360 workers across diverse occupational sectors. Our findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that compassion, manifested as a response to suffering, enhances mindfulness levels in the workplace. Specifically, we observe that organizations promoting servant leadership principles are conducive to higher levels of mindfulness among employees. Practically, our study underscores the importance of designing work contexts that prioritize compassion and servant leadership. By doing so, organizations can foster a positive work environment that promotes mindfulness and enhances workplace safety. Our research contributes to the management literature by offering empirical evidence on the role of servant leadership in cultivating compassion and mindfulness, thereby advancing the discourse on workplace safety and organizational well-being.

Responding to Positive Emotions at Work - The Four Steps and Potential Benefits of a Validating Response to Coworkers' Positive Experiences

In order to capitalize on positive emotions at work and build high-quality interpersonal relationships and psychological safety, it is important that coworkers respond to each other’s positive emotions in a constructive and validating way. However, despite the importance of symmetrical emotion regulation outcomes, organizational research has largely overlooked how an employee can positively respond to coworkers’ positive emotions. Existing research has concentrated almost exclusively on negative ways of responding, with a particular focus on envy. This article develops a theoretical model of employees’ positive responses to coworkers’ positive emotional experiences, introduced here as a validating response. We identify four steps – noticing, sensemaking, feeling, and acting – and the key mechanisms within each step that enable a responder to react in a validating way. We connect the validating response to important potential individual and organizational outcomes. These outcomes include improved relationship quality and trust, as well as increased positivity and well-being that can result in enhanced learning behavior and collaboration. This article also discusses the connection between a validating response and compassion. We identify them both as parallel affirmative processes that acknowledge a coworker’s emotions, with the former being a response to positive emotion while the latter is a response to negative emotion.

Significant Work Is About Self-Realization and Broader Purpose: Defining the Key Dimensions of Meaningful Work

Research on meaningful work has proliferated in recent years, with an increasing understanding of the centrality of meaningfulness for work-related motivation, commitment, and well-being. However, ambiguity around the main construct, “meaningful work,” has hindered this progress as various researchers have used partly overlapping, partly differing conceptualizations. To bring clarity to this issue, we examine a broad range of various definitions of meaningful work and come to argue that meaningfulness in the broadest sense is about work significance as an overall evaluation of work as regards whether it is intrinsically valuable and worth doing. Furthermore, we argue that there are two key sub-dimensions to this work significance: Broader purpose as work serving some greater good or prosocial goals (the intrinsic value of work beyond the person in question). And self-realization as a sense of autonomy, authenticity and self-expression at work (the intrinsic value of work for the person in question). Previous definitions of meaningful work feature typically one or two of these elements—significance, broader purpose, self-realization –, but in the future it would be beneficial to clearly acknowledge all three elements in both definitions and operationalizations of meaningful work.