Collective mindfulness in mainstream organisations

Organisations and the teams within them continue to search for ways to remain resilient and sustainable in a fast paced, ever-changing world. A collective form of mindfulness has been proposed as a panacea to the challenges of operating in such conditions. In defining a construct of collective mindfulness, prior research has looked to the work of Ellen Langer on mindfulness as a lens to focus on how ‘High-Reliability Organisations’ (HROs) operate in extreme, highly hazardous settings and yet have few adverse events. Although collective mindfulness has been induced from extreme contexts, original proponents Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe and colleagues have consistently argued that collective mindfulness processes should be relevant to mainstream organisations in improving anticipation and containment of the unexpected. However, there is much we do not know about collective mindfulness when applied to less extreme and less hazardous organisational settings. The primary aim of this research is to explore how principles and practices of collective mindfulness have been and could be translated and adapted to mainstream organisations: if we can better understand this translation, perhaps we can better develop organisations which both survive and thrive in uncertainty. In pursuit of this aim, this thesis presents three qualitative studies. Paper I contributes the first systematic and critical investigation of collective mindfulness research in mainstream organisations, identifying dimensions of the field and what gaps in knowledge remain, to provide a theoretically-informed guide for future research design, and a consolidated research agenda. The review also highlights a lack of processual, longitudinal studies in this field to date. Grounded in an ethnographic research project in a services firm, the remaining empirical papers take up this challenge and present two longitudinal investigations of collective mindfulness in action. Paper II contributes to the existing literature on collective mindfulness in mainstream organisations by investigating the enactment of collective mindfulness as an organisational routine, documenting and exploring the contextual factors that enable and inhibit collective mindfulness in action. Contributing to debates on the notion of ‘routinised mindfulness’, it proposes a new model of structural and relational (leadership, interpersonal) factors that affect the enactment of collective mindfulness processes and pursuit of mindful performance. Paper III applies a collective mindfulness lens to strategic ambidexterity. It responds to calls for a more fine-grained understanding of how ambidexterity is achieved in practice, investigating tensions generated within organisations seeking both operational efficiency and market-based innovation. Drawing on longitudinal data, it identifies tensions arising from ambidexterity and advances a new concept – ‘mindful ambidexterity’ – to capture multi-faceted contributions of collective mindfulness to navigating and handling ambidexterity. Together, these studies considerably extend understanding of the potential of the principles and practices to apply to a range of strategic and operational issues in the context of mainstream organisations. The thesis’ empirical evidence suggests that collective mindfulness, if successfully and structurally embedded in everyday organisational practice, has the capacity to play a meaningful role in enabling organisations to navigate tensions, paradoxes, and complexities that characterise the contemporary business environment. Thus, collective mindfulness offers significant value both to future academic research and organisational practice.