Trait Mindfulness and Paradoxical Leadership

With organizational research on mindfulness in its early stages, we still have limited understanding about how it affects leadership within teams. Our research sheds light on mindfulness and paradoxical leader behaviors, by investigating whether leader and follower trait mindfulness matters for realizing the potential benefit of paradoxical leadership behaviors in promoting followers’ performance. Using data from a large field sample, we find that followers’ high trait mindfulness helps with the functioning of paradoxical leadership. Specifically, paradoxical leadership behavior promotes follower performance when followers are high in trait mindfulness. Furthermore, when both leaders and followers are low on trait mindfulness, paradoxical leadership behaviors actually reduces follower performance. We thereby advance research on trait mindfulness and the effectiveness of paradoxical leader behaviors for employee performance.