Is Mindfulness Beneficial for Job Performance Following Positive and Negative Affective Events? The Attenuating Role of Mindfulness on Self-Serving Bias

Abstract

In line with the recent interest on the benefits of mindfulness by the popular media and industry leaders alike, mindfulness research and its effects on performance has also begun to flourish. Nonetheless, most previous research focused on mindfulness’s direct, positive relationship with performance. Therefore, in this dissertation, I explored boundary conditions of this relationship by understanding how mindfulness can interrupt automatic cognitive processes following positive and negative affective events (i.e., self-serving causal attributions), which can either positively or negatively affect performance, depending on the valence of the event. Specifically, I examined how mindfulness’s purported attenuation of self-serving bias can result in both increased and decreased levels of performance via repetitive thinking characteristics related to the affective event. Finally, I tested the full theoretical model with three studies. Study 1 was an experiment, which manipulated the affective event to examine its impact on causal attributions, repetitive thinking characteristics, and changes in performance. Study 2 was the same experiment as Study 1, but also included manipulations of both the affective event and participants’ states of mindfulness. Finally, Study 3 involved a one-week long field experiment, which utilized experience sampling methodology to understand these effects at the intra-individual level. Results from these studies lend preliminary support to the proposition that affective events may be a boundary condition of mindfulness’s relationship with task performance in that it is potentially beneficial to performance during negative events and detrimental to performance during positive events. Keywords: mindfulness, performance, affective events, self-serving bias, repetitive thinking