Why and When Does a Mindfulness Intervention Promote Job Performance? The Interpersonal Mechanisms and Individual, Job, and Social Contingencies

Abstract

This dissertation develops and tests a theoretical model of the role of a mindfulness intervention in promoting job performance in service settings. I examine the client-focused mechanisms—attentiveness, perspective taking, and response flexibility—and individual (i.e., employee agreeableness), social (i.e., perception of workgroup service climate), and job (i.e., work overload) contingencies of the relationship between a mindfulness intervention and job performance. I conducted a pretest-posttest field experiment of 72 health care professionals in a health care organization with intervention (i.e., mindfulness meditation) and active control (i.e., wellness education) conditions and repeated measures from health care professionals and their patients over 15 days. Confirmatory factor analyses suggest that the three client-focused mechanisms were represented by a higher-order construct of patient centered behavior. Multilevel modeling and latent growth modeling suggest that the two conditions are distinct; compared with active control, the intervention yields pre-to-post increases in daily mindfulness and work behaviors including self-ratings of job performance and proactive patient care and patient ratings of patient centered behavior. Multilevel mediation analysis suggests that patient ratings of patient centered behavior fail to mediate the effect of a mindfulness intervention on patient satisfaction with job performance. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses suggest that agreeableness, perceived workgroup service climate, and work overload do not moderate the effect of a mindfulness intervention (via patient ratings of patient centered behavior) on patient satisfaction. Nonetheless, compared with active control, the mindfulness intervention yields higher patient rated patient centered behavior for health care professionals who have a higher level of agreeableness.