Work-Related Mental Health and Job Performance: Can Mindfulness Help?

Abstract

Work-related mental health issues such as work-related stress and addiction to work impose a significant health and economic burden to the employee, the employing organization, and the country of work more generally. Interventions that can be empirically shown to improve levels of work-related mental health -especially those with the potential to concurrently improve employee levels of work performance -are of particular interest to occupational stakeholders. One such broad-application interventional approach currently of interest to occupational stakeholders in this respect is mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs).Following a brief explication of the mindfulness construct, this paper critically discusses current research directions in the utilization of mindfulness in workplace settings and assesses its suitability for operationalization as an organization-level work-related mental health intervention. By effecting a perceptual-shift in the mode of responding and relating to sensory and cognitive-affective stimuli, employees that undergo mindfulness training may be able to transfer the locus of control for stress from external work conditions to internal metacognitive and attentional resources. Therefore, MBIs may constitute cost-effective organization-level interventions due to not actually requiring any modifications to human resource management systems and practises. Based on preliminary empirical findings and on the outcomes of MBI studies with clinical populations, it is concluded that MBIs appear to be viable interventional options for organizations wishing to improve the mental health of their employees.

Meditation Awareness Training (MAT) for Work-related Wellbeing and Job Performance: A Randomised Controlled Trial

“…The WSIT, along with the majority of established work-stress measures, is essentially based on an 'exposure environmental' model of work stress (Van Gordon et al, 2014a). In such a model, the WRS construct is intended to reflect the extent to which employees are exposed to sub-optimal working conditions.…”

“…Examples of such conditions might be (i) low work autonomy, (ii) inflexible working hours, (iii) conflicting demands, (iv) overly-taxing or impractical deadlines, and (v) inadequate support infrastructure. This operational model of work-stress is process-orientated and emphasises the importance of the employee's 'external' work environment over and above their 'internal' psychological environment (Van Gordon et al, 2014a). This is a different conceptual stance than that employed by a meditational model of work-stress.…”

“…This is a different conceptual stance than that employed by a meditational model of work-stress. From the meditator's perspective, rather than exact changes to the external work environment, the most efficacious method of reducing stress (and psychological distress more generally) is to modify the 'internal' (i.e., psychological) working environment (Van Gordon et al, 2014a).…”

“…As further elucidated below, by inducing a perceptual-shift in the mode of responding and relating to sensory and cognitive-affective stimuli, meditating employees are better able to objectify their cognitive processes and to apprehend them as passing phenomena (Van Gordon et al, 2014a). In the traditional meditation literature, this manner of transferring the locus of control for stress from external conditions to internal metacognitive and attentional 20 resources is analogised as the difference between covering the entire outdoors with leather, versus simply adorning the feet with a leather sole (see Santideva, 1997).…”

Prayer, Meditation, and Anxiety: Durkheim Revisited

“…Several studies have indicated that mindfulness-based interventions, a cognitive approach to meditation that focuses on the acceptance of present moment experiences, can counter anxiety and other adverse conditions (Hoge et al 2013;see Gu et al 2015 for review). Mindfulness-based interventions have also been used effectively to manage everyday anxiety and panic (Evans et al 2008;Peterson and Pbert 1992) as well as improve performance in workplace settings (Gordon et al 2014). Some studies have uncovered brain activity patterns that may be responsible for the anxiety-reducing benefits of meditation (Zeidan et al 2014).…”