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Mindfulness helps improve effectiveness by facilitating the use of emotion as information, which improves learning, adaptation, and performance. When mindful we observe emotions and are curious about them rather than controlled by them, freeing us to explore what the emotion is telling us.

I discuss three forms of mindfulness that combine to create a pattern of behavior called mindful organizing. Mindful organizing has numerous benefits but there are also costs that must be balanced against the benefits. Bringing mindfulness into organizations must be done in a way that reduces costs and increases benefits; practical mindfulness is introduced as a means to do this.

Practical mindfulness begins with what is achievable at the present time and reduces the social and emotional barriers to behaving mindfully through the use of tools. Practical mindfulness recognizes the importance of interaction to task accomplishment by focusing attention on all three phases of interaction: before, during, and after.

The study investigated the predictive role of supportive leadership and psychological safety for mindful organizing and the subsequent impact of mindful organizing on individual task performance. Mindful organizing, a concept from high-reliability organizations (HROs), can improve performance in various industrial settings. The limited availability of novel predictors for mindful organizing necessitates exploring this concept in the context of adventure tourism.

Through a cross-sectional research approach, 394 respondents were selected from the adventure tourism industry in Malaysia. The proposed causal research model was evaluated through structural equation modeling (SEM), aggregation and bootstrapping.

Psychological safety and supportive leadership significantly impacted mindful organizing. Mindful organizing, in turn, was positively associated with individual task performance. The mediating role of mindful organizing between psychological safety and task performance was statistically significant. However, the mediating role of mindful organizing between supportive leadership and task performance was not statistically significant.

Managers in the adventure tourism industry should consider applying mindful organizing to increase employee productivity and develop collective sensemaking. Also, developing a culture of support among managers and coworkers, emphasizing the team's psychological safety, may boost the morale and productivity of the workforce.

This research has identified and empirically tested new antecedents, psychological safety and leadership for mindful organizing in the adventure tourism context and has addressed a significant research gap (Sutcliffe et al., 2016) by broadening the scope of mindful organizing research to encompass contexts beyond those exclusively considered HROs.

Premised on the shortage of research on the role of organisational mindfulness in promoting environmental sustainability, this study evaluates the effects of organisational mindfulness and mindful organising on environmental sustainability outcomes in the critical case of multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in the oil and gas sector in the Arabian Gulf.

Data were collected from the (oil and gas sector) MNES. A total of 92 completed responses were received. The respondents include executives, senior managers and directors. The data were analysed using SmartPLS software. The measurement and structural models were evaluated.

The models show that four (of five) dimensions of organisational mindfulness (defined as organisational goals, desires and strategies) and mindful organising (defined as organisational tactics and practices) are significantly related. Mindful organising is significantly associated with more environmentally sustainable outcomes. But contrary to expectations sensitivity to the local environment did not have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between mindful organising and environmental sustainability initiatives and outcomes of these MNEs.

The paper presents several hypotheses, most of which were confirmed. Direct effects of organizational mindfulness, mindful organizing were confirmed. Environmental sensitivity has a direct effect rather than a moderating effect (as hypothesized) on environmental sustainability.

Environmental sustainability can be approached by MNEs in the oil and gas sector by among other factors, increased environmental sensitivity, signalling environmental behaviours the organisation expects, rewards and supports and putting in place a social process that is reliant on extensive and continuous interactions between individuals and among teams regarding these environmental expectations.

Social and environmental performance of MNEs can be improved through mindfulness-based approaches, effects of which can be transmitted through a social process that relies on continuous real-time communication and interactions among members through formal and informal interactions during meetings, briefings, work and play. Sensitivity and respect for the host community and environment can bolster brand image and social relations.

The paper addresses the greening issues surrounding the largely unexplored context of the Arabian Gulf’s oil and gas sector. It demonstrates that ongoing greening communications and interactions through briefings, meetings, updates and in teams' ongoing work are some of the mechanisms for achieving sustainability. Also environmental sensitivity is a direct driver rather than a contingent factor of sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is organizing mindfully for relevant process research on strategic change. This essay arises from an increasing concern that our understanding of strategic change is not delivering meaningful, relevant and true process wisdom that allows researchers to enrich their academic discourse and practitioners to effectively realize strategic change imposed by hostile business markets. Our goal is to challenge fundamental assumptions of our field’s dominant discourse in performing research and generating theories for strategic change under real contexts, and redirect attention to a mindful organizing perspective to understand process elements of strategic change that really matter.

This paper is an essay based on theoretical reasoning. We address the relevance gap in the strategic business marketing field by focusing on one specific gap: the study and understanding of strategic change. To illustrate the relevance of a mindful organizing perspective for closing this relevance gap, we focus on the processes of mindful organizing identified by Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) and argue how these organizational processes contribute to a better understanding of strategic change while implicitly assuming a complexity-based perspective on organizing. These five processes, moreover, address the identified limitations of present approaches, i.e. formative causality, pre-interpretation and independent linearity.

We suggest a “provocative change research avenue” elaborating on the role of mindful organizing to bridge the relevance gap in this area. This advances a richer and more relevant framing to elevate theorizing in the area of strategic marketing and management beyond existing avenues, which not necessarily reflects organizational life’s equivocality, interdependencies and intricacies. We, thus, call for the field of strategic marketing and management to adopt a discourse grounded in complexity-based assumptions.

Overall, this essay highlights that closing relevance gaps in our field cannot be done with quick fix recipes. The endeavor implies a fundamental re-framing of the way we look at firms and managers. It also implies different theoretical underpinnings and more interpretive research approaches to tap the richness in real-life business settings. By focusing on one area, we have shown how such an effort might proceed.

Although the paper is mainly written for researchers of change processes and innovation in industrial companies, practitioners will get inspiration as several viewpoints for mindful organizing will help them in building a more realistic and viable change approach.

Our intended contribution is to advocate a deeper and richer process understanding of strategic change by advancing mindful organizing as an epistemological and praxeological perspective on strategic change, thereby bridging the relevance gap (Hodgkinson and Rousseau, 2009; Weick, 2001) and enriching our field’s strategic change theories. Epistemologically, mindful organizing offers a useful perspective by stressing the change process’ complexity, interdependence and emergence. Praxeologically, mindful organizing represents an adaptive organizational capability that allows organizations to develop higher awareness of their strategic change processes.

Family centered non-economic (FCNE) goals, such as environmental and social goals, are sometimes strenuous to “sell” to non-family members in a family business, and are often open to resistance. The purpose of this paper is to identify socio-psychological mechanisms for achieving FCNE goals because, in addition to economic goals, they are the other two components of the triple bottom line.

Through a juxtaposition of the literature on family businesses, and the theories of mindfulness and psychological ownership, this paper argues for the facilitating roles of family involvement and mindful organizing in the achievement of FCNE goals. An example of how a Kuwaiti oil company implements these ideas is appended.

A moderated link between family involvement, mindful organizing and FCNE goal of environmental sustainability. Besides its direct effect on environmental sustainability, mindful organizing also has a potential mediating role in the relationship between family involvement and environmental sustainability. Psychological ownership, environmental sensitivity and individual mindfulness will moderate the relationship between mindful organizing and the achievement of environmental sustainability goals.

The paper presents ten propositions and argues that three types of family involvement (ownership, management and inter-generational), together with non-family engagement (through mindful organizing) would lead to success in achieving the FCNE goal of environmental sustainability. Psychological ownership, environmental sensitivity and individual mindfulness are potential moderators.

The paper suggests some key drivers of FCNE goal of environmental sustainability as well as several contingent factors. Applicable to family businesses, owners and/or managers of similar firms can apply knowledge from this study in the pursuit of environmental sustainability.

The paper’s model advances the current understanding of the link between family involvement, mindful organizing, environmental sustainability, psychological ownership, environmental sensitivity and individual mindfulness in the context of family business. The paper further suggests new future research directions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether insights into high reliability organizations (HROs) are useful for innovation management teams. HRO teams can keep failure to a minimum level due to high alertness and resilience. Project teams working on innovation management could benefit from HRO principles and thus reduce their chances of failure.

A survey among in total 260 team members and team leaders of project teams in innovation management was conducted to study the relation between, on the one hand, organizational features of HROs (“mindful infrastructure”) and HRO principles (adjusted as “innovation resilience behaviour”, IRB), and on the other hand, between mindful infrastructure and IRB and project outcomes.

From the results it could be concluded that mindful infrastructure associates with IRB, and that IRB has a mediating role in the relation between mindful infrastructure and project outcomes. Innovation management project teams can thus learn from the practice of HRO teams.

To the authors’ knowledge, HRO-thinking has not been applied to team behaviour in innovation management. A fruitful transfer of insights from the domain of safety and crisis management seems applicable to the domain of innovation.

This paper seeks to provide a critical review of the theoretical conception and practical implications of the notion of mindfulness (introduced to organization theory by Karl Weick and colleagues). As this concept aims at clarifying the mechanisms of knowledge creation and knowledge re‐configuration, the notion of mindfulness is used and refined to contribute to explaining some of the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities. Thus, the paper aims to show how putting “new wine” (mindfulness) into “old bottles” (dynamic capabilities) can add to the clarification of the nature and development of dynamic capabilities.

The paper explores and reviews the literature on mindfulness as well as dynamic capabilities and engages in conceptual development based on this literature. Based on this literature review, propositions are developed that regard mindfulness as a micro‐foundation of dynamic capabilities.

It is shown that the literature neglects opportunistic behaviour, issues of power, and self‐contradictory aspects of the principles for mindful organizing. It is argued that mindfulness should neither be understood as an attribute of an entity nor be simply contrasted with routine, but should rather be depicted as a medium and outcome of social practices which involves enacting power and drawing pre‐reflectively on a background that is built up by routines. Five propositions describe how such a refined understanding of mindfulness can contribute to explaining the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities such as “sensing opportunities and threats”, “seizing opportunities”, and “reconfiguring a company's assets”.

While there are apparent parallels between the notion of mindfulness and the concept of dynamic capabilities, there are also some notable differences. The discussion of dynamic capability puts more emphasis on routines that introduce instability and ambiguity rather than coping with (externally posed) the unexpected. As a consequence, the propositions regarding the relation between mindfulness and dynamic capabilities should be further elaborated and validated or refuted empirically.

First, the paper delineates the limits of (organizing for) mindfulness which has been applied quite uncritically by organization scholars. Second, it derives five propositions that highlight previously neglected mechanisms of how dynamic capabilities develop, therefore adding to one's understanding of the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities.

This paper aims to investigate the principles of high reliability organisations (HROs), present in safety and crisis teams, as applied to innovation teams. Safety and crisis teams cannot fail, as failure leads to disaster and casualties. Innovation teams cannot fail either, as this harms the organisations’ competitiveness and effectiveness. Do HRO principles, rooted in mindful infrastructure, enable innovation resilience behaviour (IRB)?

A study of 18 innovation projects performed by project teams was carried out. A survey by team members/leaders of these teams was completed; team members/leaders of other projects were added to achieve a larger sample. Mindful infrastructure consists of team psychological safety, team learning, complexity leadership and team voice. The analyses assessed the teams’ mindful infrastructures as a causal condition enabling IRB.

Applying qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the findings indicate that mindful infrastructure enables team IRB, which is a set of team behaviours indicating their resilience when encountering critical incidents. Teams apply different “paths” to IRB.

The exploratory study’s generalizability is limited. The findings nonetheless indicate the usefulness of non-linear techniques for understanding different roads to successful innovation processes.

HRO principles are applicable by non-HROs. These require investments in organisational learning.

HRO studies fail to account for the antecedents of HRO principles. This study groups these antecedents of team behaviour into a mindful infrastructure. QCA has not been applied within the domain of HROs before and only scarcely within the domain of innovation teams.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a process model on how mindfully performed organisational routines can simultaneously enable organisational stability and organisational change.

Via conceptual analysis, the authors develop several propositions and a process model integrating the theory of mindfulness and performative aspects of organisational routines with organisational stability and change. To do so, the authors review the literature on organisational routines, mindfulness, stability, inertia and change.

First, the authors demonstrate that, based on levels of mindfulness employed, performative aspects of organisational routines can be categorised as mindless, mindful and collectively mindful (meta-routines). Second, in the process model, the authors position the mindless performance of routines as enabling organisational stability, mediated through inertial pressure and disabling change, mediated through constrained change capacities. Finally, the authors state that engaging routines with mindfulness at an individual (mindful routines) or collective (meta-routines) level reduces inertia and facilitates change. Such simultaneous engagement leads to either sustaining stability when required or implementing continuous organisational change.

The framework uses continuous, versus episodic, change; future research can consider the model’s workability with episodic change. Future research can also seek to empirically validate the model. The authors hope that this model informs research in organisational change and provides guidance on addressing organisational inertia.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to categorise the performative aspects of organisational routine based on the extent of mindfulness employed and propose that mindfulness-based practice of routines stimulates either inertia-induced or inertia-free stability and continuous change.

Drawing on the social exchange theory, the authors extend the high-reliability literature by examining employees' subjective experience of working in contexts engaging in mindful organizing (MO). Ultimately, they ask the question about how MO affects employees' attitudes and behavior toward work and organization, such us organizational commitment (OC), motivation to work and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), in ordinary business settings. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The authors surveyed 307 employees from various industries, using paper-and-pencil questionnaires. A series of hierarchical regression analyses and structural equation modeling were performed to test our hypotheses.

The authors found that MO is positively related to employees' affective and normative commitment to an organization, and that affective commitment is positively related to motivation to work and OCB. The study also reveals that the affective commitment has a partially mediating role in the MO – motivation and MO – OCB relations. Although several researchers argue that the effectiveness of MO may be higher in an uncertain environment, the authors’ study indicates that the environment does not moderate the relationship between MO and OC.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first attempts to explore the effects of MO in a traditional (i.e. nonhigh reliability) business context. Furthermore, their findings prove that MO not only leads to higher reliability and greater safety, as previous studies show, but it also positively affects performance-related attitudes and behavior.