The mindful emotion management framework: How mindfulness helps employees manage emotions through reactivity, regulation, and reappraisal

• Main Authors: REB, Jochen, THEODORE CHARLES MASTERS-WAAGE
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Mindfulness; emotions at work; Mindful Emotion Management Framework; Human Resources Management; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6925
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Mindfulness has been shown to help employees manage emotions at work across a number of workplace domains, including emotional labor, burnout, and team conflict. However, along with understanding that mindfulness helps employees manage emotions, it is equally important we understand how mindfulness does so. We address this question by synthesizing a rich, but fractured literature spanning neuroscience, cognitive, and clinical psychology into a single coherent framework. The result is the Mindful Emotion Management Framework (MEMF). The MEMF proposes three distinct, and to some extent sequential, mechanisms by which mindfulness helps manage emotions in the workplace. These are: 1) reducing emotional reactivity, 2) improving emotion regulation, and 3) enabling adaptive reappraisal. We use the framework to explain past findings and to identify avenues for future research. By providing an interdisciplinary framework of how mindfulness moderates the link between experiences, emotions, and behaviors, this chapter hopes to provide a firm theoretical grounding from which future scholars can explore the role of mindfulness in emotions at work.