Tracing Mindfulness through Clinical Knowledge Sharing, Role Development, and Sensemaking

Diaz, Carmen

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ck62-kr66

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Tracing Mindfulness through Clinical Knowledge Sharing, Role Development, and Sensemaking

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Mindfulness is the dynamic process of building and maintaining awareness of one’s environment and paying attention to stimuli (Langer, 1989; Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). A cognitively effortful endeavor, mindfulness requires “the capacity to respond to unanticipated cues or signals from one’s context” (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006, p. 504). Mindful attending to each stimulus is near impossible (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006), as individuals and organizations are often flooded with too many distractions and ambiguous signals to pay sufficient attention to each one (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006). Originating in the psychological literature around individual (“trait”) mindfulness, it has since been expanded in the organizational literature to address more macro lenses (e.g., Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2012). This development was propelled by high-reliability organizations (HROs) and their need to anticipate and guard themselves against potentially harmful unexpected events. Mindfulness has since been applied in less risky contexts (Ray, Baker, & Plowman, 2011; Yu & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2018).This dissertation explores the role that mindfulness plays in the workplace, especially in its capacity to support employee interactions and professional growth. In Chapter One, I look at how the successful engagement of clinicians requires mindful interactions so that clinicians can co-create research routines. Through the lens of the clinician’s perspective, I analyze the mechanisms for successful clinician engagement in translational medicine and introduce the concept of an “interactive holding environment.” A nod to the conversation around mindfulness and routines, Chapter Two assesses the extent to which burnout influences routine and role change. It highlights the dynamism of mindfulness and shows it to be strongly tied to burnout during job crafting and role development endeavors. Finally, Chapter Three switches empirical contexts to explore how nurses anticipate, make sense of, and respond to alerting technology. It identifies key anticipatory mechanisms that guide situational sensemaking (patient personas, time-chunking, and positioning) and discusses “bounded mindfulness” - a concept that individuals are always seeking mindfulness but are bounded by their ability to achieve perfect mindfulness. Together, these three chapters walk through different applications of mindfulness to underscore its widespread influence in the workplace.

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