My dissertation investigated when and why state mindfulness will be helpful or harmful as an on-the-spot workplace intervention. The underlying idea is that people could meditate at work for 8-15 minutes when they are in a problem situation which causes excessive stress, feelings of threat, or negative emotion, or before engaging in specific tasks. One project demonstrated that a state of mindfulness can improve decision-making by increasing resistance to the sunk-cost bias (Hafenbrack, Kinias, & Barsade, 2014, Psychological Science). Another project sought to determine whether a state of mindfulness influences negotiation performance - while one study found a strong negative effect of mindfulness on negotiation, overall we did not find reliable effects. Another project found that state mindfulness impairs task motivation but not performance (Hafenbrack & Vohs, 2018, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes). The last project was a review and theory paper in which I proposed a model of when and why a state of mindfulness will help or harm aspects of job performance (Hafenbrack, 2017, Journal of Business Research).
Current projects (* denotes shared authorship)
Hafenbrack, A.C.*, Cameron, L.*, Spreitzer, G., Noval, L. J., Zhang, C., & Shaffakat, S. Mindfulness and prosocial behavior, under review.
Kay, A. A., Hafenbrack, A. C., Skarlicki, D. P., & Griffin, M. J. Mindfulness and psychological resources, under review.
Hafenbrack, A. C., Solal, I., & LaPalme, M. L. Mindfulness, guilt, and payback, reject & resubmit.
Sim, S.*, Sguera, F.*, & Hafenbrack, A. C.* A roadmap for inducing state mindfulness, working paper.