Collective mindfulness in organizational sub-units

Modern business environments are characterized by significant volatility, complexity, and uncertainty. To survive and grow in such environments, organizations need to continuously look out for signals of opportunities or threats arising from within or outside the organization. The collective mindfulness of organizational members serves as a vital tool that enables them to identify these signals quickly and to act proactively in fast-changing situations. Collective mindfulness not only facilitates learning and minimizes errors while managing day-to-day operations, but it also enables organizations to ‘think on their feet’ and develop agility while steering the organization in the right direction strategically. 

Drawing from High-Reliability Organization (HRO) contexts such as air traffic control, naval aircraft carriers, and medical emergency teams, which are able to minimize incidents of failures and disasters, even though they frequently deal with extreme uncertainties, risks and safety hazards, studies have sought to answer the question: what are those ‘mindfulness’ practices that other organizations can learn from HROs. Scholars are increasingly interested in exploring possibilities of transferring these superior collective mindfulness practices to mainstream organizational settings that do not have a safety imperative, but are nevertheless regularly exposed to novelty, volatility, and turbulence. However, research in this area remains nascent; there is a dearth of studies addressing how collective mindfulness manifests in normal mainstream organizations. Moreover, extant research has focused largely on collective mindfulness at the organization level, while mindfulness in organizational subunits such as departments, groups, and teams has remained slighted. Recognizing the significance of sub-units and teams in today’s organizations, this thesis explores collective mindfulness in organizational sub-units. 

This thesis first presents a critical review of the literature on collective mindfulness, bringing forth some of the theoretical issues that remain unresolved using a combination of gap spotting and problematization approaches. Thereon it takes the form of four studies, to be developed as manuscripts for publication. Paper I conceptually establishes the relevance of collective mindfulness for organizational decisions and strategies, particularly with reference to three theoretical perspectives, namely, behavioral strategy, strategy-as-practice, and dynamic capabilities view. Paper II contributes by empirically exploring the ‘lived experience’ of collective mindfulness, through a phenomenological study of Indian service teams. Papers III and IV delve deeper into how collective mindfulness is manifested in sub- units of organizations using multi-level quantitative analysis. Specifically, paper III empirically examines the behavioral antecedents of collective mindfulness, highlighting the complexities, constraints, and tensions of social interactions that shape collective functioning. Paper IV investigates the impact of collective mindfulness on sensing and reconfiguring dynamic capabilities, and on the performance of organizational sub-units. 

By exploring sub-unit level manifestations of collective mindfulness and explaining how interactions and behaviors influence, and are in turn, influenced by collective mindfulness, this thesis provides a fine-grained understanding of how sub-units and teams respond to novelty and uncertainty. Insights from this thesis may not only provide stronger support to the promising academic research on collective mindfulness, but may also lead to better organizational processes, strategies and outcomes.