BUS603: Managing People

Despite its contributions, our work is not without limitations, offering interesting directions for future research. Most notably, due to the cross-sectional design, causal conclusions cannot be drawn from our data and the direction of the revealed effects are based on theoretical deliberations. Accordingly, alternative explanations and common underlying antecedents of all examined variables cannot be entirely excluded. For instance, research has started to explore socio-contextual factors at work, such as managerial need support, as antecedents of mindful states. While contextual factors may facilitate or inhibit the experience of mindful states, they may also affect the well-being and communication behavior of leaders and followers. Hence, future research would benefit from using longitudinal data and controlling for more context variables. This would also shed further light on potential moderating effects. For instance, it is plausible that the beneficial effects of mindfulness in communication may best unfold in fast-paced and volatile high performance contexts, where the quality of leadership communication is particularly important for organizational adaptation and functioning. In contrast, in highly bureaucratic organizations with strict regulations and protocols for decision-making, communication is usually organized and formal and thus, mindfulness may be less relevant.

A second limitation refers to our sample size, in that we were able to recruit, on average, only a few followers per leader. While our sample size is in line with similar studies in this field, we nonetheless hope that future studies will address this limitation and gather more data from multiple raters assessing mindfulness in communication. Importantly, high agreement among multiple raters will further corroborate our notion of mindfulness in communication as a stable communication pattern.

A third issue, one that is both a limitation and, we believe, a strength, refers to our mindfulness in communication measure, which we developed for this study. It is a strength because it allowed us to capture very proximal behavioral correlates of core aspects of mindfulness in a person's communication behavior, while similar measures in this field tend to be much wider. For instance, measures of active listening or general communication style typically focus on being generally sensitive to the feelings and concerns of others. Also, such measures usually include skills pertaining to information processing (i.e., remembering, summarizing, and clarifying points) and responding (i.e., asking for feedback, nonverbal signals). At the same time, however, given the constitutive nature of our work, the construct of mindfulness in communication requires further exploration and validation. Although we substantiated the psychometric properties of our newly developed measure in a separate sample, there remains room for further scrutiny with regard to its nomological network as well as its discriminant, convergent, and predictive validity. Concretely, it would be useful in future research to test our measure against the above mentioned measures of active listening and interpersonal communication style. Such studies would benefit from considering additional, more diverse outcomes, at both the individual and the interpersonal level. In terms of individual outcomes, it would be particularly fruitful to capture followers' basic need satisfaction, as we used this in our theoretical framework but did not include it in our measurement strategy. At the interpersonal level, it would be interesting to see whether mindfulness in communication has a unique effect on the relationship quality between leaders and followers, reflected in LMX and trust as well as integrative conflict resolution.

A fourth limitation of our study refers to the role of emotion regulation and how it is thought to translate into leaders' communication behaviors. Specifically, we exclusively referred to the regulation of unpleasant emotions, while ignoring positive emotions. However, even though research on mindfulness and emotion regulation has a strong focus on unpleasant emotions, such as anger, fear, or avoidance, from the perspective of Buddhism, also pleasant emotions, such as pride or desire, can be disturbing. That said, mindful leaders should not only stay calm when unpleasant emotions arise but also in the presence of pleasant emotions. Thus, it will be interesting in future research on mindfulness in communication to give a stronger focus on the interplay and regulation of both pleasant and unpleasant emotional states. Such studies could include direct measures of specific emotion regulation strategies, most notably expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, and test whether and to what extent they may exert differential effects on mindfulness in communication.

In terms of more general directions for future research, it will be useful to replicate our results in different settings, such as mentoring or coaching relationships. In such studies it would be interesting to include alternative, more differentiated mindfulness scales which assess different facets of mindfulness. Although the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory is a well-established instrument which is currently available in various languages, the use of other instruments such as the Five Factors Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) or the Comprehensive Inventory of Mindfulness Experiences (CHIME), which measure different sub-facets of mindfulness, may help to further clarify the effects of mindfulness on communication behaviors. Notably, by further investigating the utility of the newly developed mindfulness in communication measure across different samples and contexts, and by comparing it to more nuanced measures of dispositional mindfulness, future research may address the call for alternative, "indirect" measures of a person's level of mindfulness, which is grounded in the ongoing criticism of self-assessment questionnaires. Although the validation of our newly developed instrument is still at an early stage, our study offers a promising basis for such indirect measures of dispositional mindfulness. In other words, measuring mindfulness in communication may aid future research in addressing the question of whether there are "objective and observable criteria of mindfulness".

Another interesting avenue for future research could be to examine the cognitive processes behind mindfulness in communication in more detail. This is particularly true for the role of the capacity to disengage the self from the event, as reflected in the notion of reperceiving or decentering. Future studies could include a separate decentering measure and explore whether there are distinct relationships with the features of mindfulness in communication. Such studies may also benefit from more thoroughly disentangling the process of decentering. Recent research suggests that this kind of perspective shifting may be better understood as a process, including meta-awareness, disidentification from inner experience, and reduced reactivity to thought content.

Finally, mindfulness research in general could benefit from taking up the reflections and criticisms of several scholars who advocate a notion of mindfulness that goes beyond its current conceptualization in Western psychology.