When Mindfulness Interacts With Neuroticism to Enhance Transformational Leadership: The Role of Psychological Need Satisfaction

The mindful leader: a review of leadership qualities derived from mindfulness meditation

Mindfulness has been practiced by global leaders and companies as an efficient way to build effective leadership. Because of its popularity, plus the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework that explains it in a leadership context, the research literature has called for a coherent account of the qualities that is derived by those leaders that practice mindfulness. Here, we aim to answer that call, by clarifying what leadership qualities can develop from practicing mindfulness. We report on a semi-systematic literature review of extant research, covering 19 research articles published between 2000 and 2021, plus other relevant supporting literature from the disciplines of leadership and neuropsychology. Our proposed framework consists of three main qualities of the mindful leader: attention, awareness, and authenticity. We call them the "three pillars of mindful leaders." We also propose that mindfulness meditation must be integrated into our proposed framework, as we are convinced that leaders who hope to benefit from these qualities must integrate a regular mindfulness meditation practice into their daily leadership life.

The Black Unicorn Effect: Micro-daily Events and Satisfaction Decrease the COVID-19 Xenophobia, but Only for Those With Low Levels of Neuroticism

Drawing on the behavioral concordance model and the trait activation theory, this study examined how and when daily micro-events influence COVID-19 xenophobic attitudes. First, we examined the mediating role of satisfaction, and then, tested the moderating role of neuroticism in the mediated relationship. Overall, 340 working adults volunteered to participate in this study. The findings revealed that (1) satisfaction mediated the negative relationship between daily micro-events and xenophobic attitudes and (2) neuroticism moderated this relationship such that xenophobic attitudes increased for neurotic individuals, even when their satisfaction increased. Our findings contribute to understanding the relationship between daily micro-events and COVID-19 xenophobia and provide empirical evidence for the combined effects of personality factors and affective factors on xenophobic attitudes. Furthermore, we evidence the existence of the black unicorn effect, that is, neurotic individuals tend to transpose their neurotic cognitions and emotions to xenophobic attitudes despite the uplifting and satisfying nature of positive events.

Latent profile analysis of security among patients with COVID-19 infection in mobile cabin hospitals and its relationship with psychological capital

Aim

COVID-19 patients' security is related to their mental health. However, the classification of this group's sense of security is still unclear. The aim of our research is to clarify the subtypes of security of patients infected with COVID-19, explore the factors affecting profile membership, and examine the relationship between security and psychological capital for the purpose of providing a reference for improving patients' sense of security and mental health.

Methods

A total of 650 COVID-19 patients in a mobile cabin hospital were selected for a cross-sectional survey from April to May 2022. They completed online self-report questionnaires that included a demographic questionnaire, security scale, and psychological capital scale. Data analysis included latent profile analysis, variance analysis, the Chi-square test, multiple comparisons, multivariate logistical regression, and hierarchical regression analysis.

Results

Three latent profiles were identified-low security (Class 1), moderate security (Class 2), and high security (Class 3)-accounting for 12.00, 49.51, and 38.49% of the total surveyed patients, respectively. In terms of the score of security and its two dimensions, Class 3 was higher than Class 2, and Class 2 was higher than Class 1 (all P < 0.001). Patients with difficulty falling asleep, sleep quality as usual, and lower tenacity were more likely to be grouped into Class 1 rather than Class 3; Patients from families with a per capita monthly household income <3,000 and lower self-efficacy and hope were more likely to be grouped into Classes 1 and 2 than into Class 3. Psychological capital was an important predictor of security, which could independently explain 18.70% of the variation in the patients' security.

Conclusions

Security has different classification features among patients with COVID-19 infection in mobile cabin hospitals. The security of over half of the patients surveyed is at the lower or middle level, and psychological capital is an important predictor of the patients' security. Medical staff should actively pay attention to patients with low security and help them to improve their security level and psychological capital.

Workplace Bullying and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptomology: The Influence of Role Conflict and the Moderating Effects of Neuroticism and Managerial Competencies

Research has explored numerous consequences of workplace bullying, including a recent link to the exhibition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology. Role conflict as a workplace stressor may contribute to instances of bullying from a passive perspective, which may lead to PTSD symptomology in victims. What remains less explored is if role conflict has a direct relationship to PTSD symptomology and how personality traits such as neuroticism and workplace factors such as managerial competencies may moderate the stress brought on by role conflict. Hence the present study seeks to examine this gap in the literature. This study utilizes a between-subjects, cross-sectional design with 159 participants, 39.6% male and 60.4% female. Most participants (60%) were Italian workers of a large social cooperative organization. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the measurement model was valid and had an adequate model fit. Results from two separate moderated mediation analyses found a positive, full mediation between the independent variable of role conflict, the mediator of exposure to bullying, and the dependent variable of PTSD symptomology. Furthermore, in this study, neuroticism strengthened the indirect effect while managerial competencies weakened it. The results highlight the importance of training competent managers and providing resources for more vulnerable employees to moderate employee work stress and its negative outcomes.

Transformational Leadership and Psychological Well-Being of Service-Oriented Staff: Hybrid Data Synthesis Technique

Leaders play a significant role in organizations and their leadership behaviors can either enhance or undermine the well-being of their employees. This study aimed to meta-analyze the relationship between transformational leadership and well-being in the service industry, and how employees’ gender and service sector moderated the strength of this relationship. This study used a convergent mixed-method approach. PubMed, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, AMED, and Scopus electronic databases were utilized to search for relevant studies. Textual data were analyzed using a text data-mining technique (Leximancer) to determine the relevant themes and concepts. Statistical data were examined through a comprehensive meta-analysis to determine their effect sizes. The qualitative results outline the major themes that emerged: leadership, well-being, and health. The quantitative findings revealed that the perceived well-being of male employees and those working outside of the health-care service sector was positively higher when employees’ leaders showed transformational leadership. In general, the findings from the qualitative and quantitative data converge. The findings confirm the positive relationship between transformational leadership and employee well-being. This study also highlights the applicability of a convergent mixed-method approach as a useful methodological strategy when analyzing both lexical and statistical data.

Leader Psychological Need Satisfaction Trickles Down: The Role of Leader-Member Exchange

This article addresses the impact of leader psychological need satisfaction on employees. We draw on the self-determination theory (SDT) and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory to investigate if and how leader psychological need satisfaction trickles down to employee psychological need satisfaction. Adopting a multi-actor, multilevel design, results from 1036 leader-employee dyads indicate that employee-rated LMX mediates the trickle-down effect of leader psychological need satisfaction. Additional analyses of leader psychological needs show that leader competence is the main psychological need that underlying this relationship. We also found an unexpected negative association between leader autonomy need satisfaction and employee competence need satisfaction. Overall, this study shows the importance of both (1) leaders' psychological need satisfaction and (2) employee perceptions of the relationship quality for employee psychological need satisfaction.

Distinguishing the Explicit Power Motives

Abstract. Power is an important motivator at work, particularly for leaders. However, power also relates to dark personality traits, which negatively affect employees and organizations. Therefore, we argue that a high explicit power motive is a double-edged sword depending on whether people desire power for dominance, prestige, or leadership. We explored these research questions in a cross-sectional ( N = 151 employees) and a prospective study ( N = 371 leaders). Both studies revealed that dominance is most strongly related to Machiavellianism and moderately to narcissism and psychopathy. Prestige related strongly to narcissism and weakly to Machiavellianism, while leadership only weakly related to narcissism. Dominance best predicted counterproductive work behavior (CWB), while leadership best-predicted organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In addition, Study 2 showed that transformational and, to a lesser extent, transactional leadership styles mediated the relations between the three power motives with OCB and CWB, respectively. Thus, promoting transformational leadership might be a fruitful way of channeling leaders’ power motives into pro-social actions.

An Integrative Review on the Research Progress of Mindfulness and Its Implications at the Workplace

Mindfulness has rapidly become a significant subject area in many disciplines. Most of the work on mindfulness has focused on the perspective of health and healthcare professionals, but relatively less research is focused on the organizational outcomes at the workplace. This review presents a theoretical and practical trajectory of mindfulness by sequential integration of recent fragmented scholarly work on mindfulness at the workplace. The review showcases that most contemporary practical challenges in organizations, such as anxiety, stress, depression, creativity, motivation, leadership, relationships, teamwork, burnout, engagement, performance, well-being, and physical and psychological health, could be addressed successfully with the budding concept of mindfulness. The causative processes due to higher mindfulness that generate positive cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral outcomes include focused attention, present moment awareness, non-judgmental acceptance, self-regulatory functions, lower mind wandering, lower habit automaticity, and self-determination. Employee mindfulness could be developed through various mindfulness interventions in order to improve different organizational requirements, such as psychological capital, emotional intelligence, prosocial behavior, in-role and extra-role performance, financial and economic performance, green performance, and well-being. Accordingly, this review would be beneficial to inspire academia and practitioners on the transformative potential of mindfulness in organizations for higher performance, well-being, and sustainability. Future research opportunities and directions to be addressed are also discussed.

Relationship between nursing mentorship and transformational leadership of mentor: A cross-sectional study

AIM

The purpose of this research was to explore nurses' mentorship, mentors' basic psychological needs satisfaction and transformational leadership. Moreover, this study evaluated the moderating role of a protégé's mindfulness.

BACKGROUND

Previous research had only focused on the benefits that protégés reaped from the mentoring relationship, neglected the mentor's benefits.

METHOD

We conducted an analysis of a cross-sectional sample comprising 366 frontline nurses in China. Descriptive, correlation and regression analyses were conducted using SPSS 22.0. Mediating, moderating and conditional process analyses were conducted using Process Macro 3.3.

RESULTS

Mentorship is associated with mentors' transformational leadership through the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs (β = .13, 95% confidence interval [CI]: [0.05, 0.23]). The indirect association of mentorship and transformational leadership is stronger for protégés with low mindfulness levels (β = -.05, 95% CI: [-0.08, -0.02]).

CONCLUSION

The establishment of healthy associations between mentors and protégés facilitates the fulfilment of the mentors' basic psychological needs, enhancing the former's transformational leadership, especially for protégés with low mindfulness levels.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Mentors should provide more meaningful knowledge about the organisation and protégés' career path, obtain information to help tailor the advice and put more energy into building trust-based relationships with protégés.

Work-to-Family Spillover Effects of Workplace Negative Gossip: A Mediated Moderation Model

Existing research has found that workplace negative gossip exerts a negative impact on employees and organizations. However, there is a lack of study on the spillover effect of workplace negative gossip on employees’ families. This paper aimed to address this gap in prior literature. Based on resource conservation theory, we chose married employees who perceived or suffered from workplace negative gossip as the subjects and analyzed the effect of workplace negative gossip on their work–family conflict. We adopted a self-reported questionnaire to assess employees’ perception or experience of workplace negative gossip, psychological distress, level of neuroticism, and work–family conflicts. A total of 245 valid employee questionnaires were obtained from two-wave data collection in China. The results of the empirical analysis indicated that workplace negative gossip perceived or suffered by employees has a positive impact on their work–family conflicts, and psychological distress plays a mediating role in the relationship between perceived or suffered workplace negative gossip and employees’ work–family conflict. Furthermore, we found that employees’ level of neuroticism moderates the positive effect of workplace negative gossip and work–family conflict, and it also moderates the mediating effect of workplace negative gossip on employees’ work–family conflict by psychological distress. The conclusion of this paper supported our previous hypotheses. Finally, according to the earlier findings, we discussed the theoretical contributions, practical significance, and limitations of the study and provided some practical suggestions for managers.

Leadership and work engagement: Exploring explanatory mechanisms

Construct proliferation in the leadership field raises questions concerning parsimony and whether we should focus on joint mechanisms of leadership styles, rather than the differences between them. In this theoretical research article, we propose that positive leadership styles translate into similar leader behaviors on the work floor that influence employee work engagement through a number of shared pathways. We take a deductive approach and review several established theories as well as relevant up-to-date empirical work from a bird’s-eye view to generate a general framework. We introduce a model with three processes (one direct process and two indirect processes) and five pathways (practical, motivational, affective, cognitive, and behavioral). With regard to the indirect processes, we propose that work characteristics (material pathway) and psychological need satisfaction (intrapersonal motivational pathway) mediate the relationship between positive leadership styles and engagement. Regarding the direct interpersonal process, we propose that leaders directly influence employee engagement through three pathways: emotional contagion (affective interpersonal pathway), social exchange (cognitive interpersonal pathway), and role modeling (behavioral interpersonal pathway). Our parsimonious research model furthers the integration of different theoretical viewpoints as well as underscores joint mechanisms with regard to the effect of positive leadership styles. Practically speaking, this article also provides insight into which processes leaders can work on to stimulate employee work engagement through progressive policies and work practices.

Multilevel Impacts of Transformational Leadership on Service Quality: Evidence From China

In service contexts, leaders’ efforts to maintain and enhance employees’ service quality are vital to organizational performance. However, few studies have investigated the mechanisms underlying the relationship between transformational leadership (TFL) and employees’ service quality across levels. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this study investigated the multilevel impacts of TFL on employees’ service quality and the multilevel mechanisms mediating this relationship. Data were collected from 208 managers and 1,431 employees at 223 branches (chain restaurants) of a large catering corporation in southern China. The results showed that stronger TFL significantly improved employees’ service quality at both individual and branch level. Affective commitment and psychological empowerment partially mediated the relationship between individual-level TFL and employees’ service quality. Branch-level service climate fully mediated the relationship between branch-level TFL and employees’ service quality.