Groups & Teams Overview
- 1Radboudumc Center for Mindfulness, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, Netherlands
- 2Kalapa Leadership Academy, Cologne, Germany
- 3Division of Integrative Health Promotion, Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Coburg, Germany
- 4Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
- 5Institute of Medical Psychology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany
How Leaders Experience the Effects of Mindfulness Training on Leader Capabilities
Introduction
In popular literature, Mindfulness is promoted as an effective leadership development tool (Bunting, 2016; Reitz and Chaskalson, 2016; Hougaard and Carter, 2018) and is increasingly offered in leadership development training. Mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 2011, p. 291). This state may seem at odds with the primary objective of leaders, which is to get results and be future-oriented (Goleman, 2004). Lyddy and Good (2017, p. 1) showed that mindfulness may be applied to goal-directed behavior at work as a way of “being while doing.”
Highly-self-aware leaders are highly self-efficacious and more likely to be effective leaders (Day and Dragoni, 2015). Researchers highlight the importance of a leader’s ability to regulate (negative) emotions. Emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize and manage emotions in self and others, is related to team and leader performance (Ashkanasy and Dasborough, 2003; Ashkanasy and Dorris, 2017). There is an ethical and virtuous aspect to managing emotions for leaders (Brown and Treviño, 2006; Jackson, 2018), responsibility for acting in a way that causes the least amount of harm for others, grounded in an awareness that leader behaviors are strongly related to followers’ wellbeing, job and life satisfaction (Kelloway et al., 2005) and that both positive and negative emotions of leaders may be contagious.
Leaders need to be able to lead themselves and others effectively. Self-leadership is a set of behavioral and cognitive strategies related to enhanced (individual) performance (Furtner et al., 2013). This includes behavior-focused strategies such as self-goal setting and self-observation and constructive thought patterns such as evaluating beliefs and assumptions. Sampl et al. (2017) showed that mindfulness-based self-leadership training effectively improved self-leadership capabilities. Self-leadership is distinct but associated with active leadership styles (Furtner et al., 2013), and improvements in self-leadership aspects are likely to be associated with improvements in leadership style and vice versa.
Given the fast-changing nature of today’s dynamic environment, Nesbit (2012) emphasizes teaching leaders the meta-skills needed to continuously develop themselves in a self-guided manner as a critical leadership competency. It remains unclear how leaders can be trained in sel