In contemporary organizations, managing workers’
attention is more critical to success than managing workers’ temporal location.
Mindfulness, which represents an essential dimension of attention, has been
associated with many important individual and work outcomes. However, we know
relatively little about how mindfulness is cultivated at the individual level,
and the little we know places the individual in full control of cultivating
mindfulness; implicitly conceptualizing managers as relatively passive
characters in the cultivation of worker mindfulness. Integrating the
mindfulness literature with work design, I propose an attention-based model of
work design, through which key work characteristics are linked to worker
mindfulness through the mediating effects of psychological demands and
job-based psychological ownership. I test portions of this model with two samples. In
sample 1, I use survey data from 555 employees from a regional healthcare
system to examine the relationships between key work characteristics and
job-based psychological ownership. In sample 2, I use survey data from 211
individuals to test both the proposed job-based psychological ownership path to
mindfulness, as well as the proposed psychological demands path to mindfulness.
I end with a discussion of the findings, limitations, and opportunities for
future research.
History
Degree Type
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management