Mindful Organizing : Establishing and Extending the Foundations of Highly Reliable Performance

Consistent with the positive organizational scholarship (POS) focus on positively deviant performance, mindful organizing represents a set of social processes that underlie the near-flawless performance of high-reliability organizations (HROs). This chapter details the foundations of mindful organizing, reviews recent empirical developments, and proposes five potential directions for further theoretical and empirical development, each of which deepens its contribution and connection to POS. The first proposed direction is to conceptually and empirically link both Eastern and Western conceptions of individual mindfulness and mindful organizing. The second is to establish the affective foundations of mindful organizing, namely how emotion affects the relationships between mindful organizing and error-free performance, the discrete emotions that constitute mindful organizing, and how emotional narratives sustain mindful organizing. Third is to examine a broader range of outcomes of mindful organizing, including its effects on employees. Fourth is to better link mindful organizing to leader attributes and leadership processes. Last, the impact of mindful organizing also requires further construct validation, including differentiating it from related constructs and establishing its responsiveness to interventions