Inspiring Minds during the Change Process: The Effect of Mindfulness on Employees’ Affective Commitment to Change

Abstract

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In this modern world, change has been happening continuously due to the astonishingly rapid development of digital technology during the past 20 years. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of people have to change from work in the office to work from home. Facing this sudden change, one of the challenges business owners and managagers meet is to improve employees readiness for change and keep them committed to the change processes. Thus, people have been trying to find methods and factors that can help improve the employee’s resilience capacity to be ready in adapting to the change, and mindfulness is identified as one of the impactful factors. Additionally, leaders play an important role in leading and supporting their followers through the change process. The extend to which employees perceive servant leadership from their direct supervisors significantly affects their readiness for and commitment to the change. Theorefore, this study tested a moderated mediation model based on the Broaden and-build theory by collecting 195 Vietnamese employees who experienced the change to work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings suggest that employees’ mindfulness can improve their readiness for change and that readiness for change, in turn, enhances their affective commitment to the change to work from home. This study contributed several theoretical and practical significances to the extant mindfulness literature. For theoretical contributions, the above findings act as an empirical evidence to support the validity of the Broaden-and-build theory in the Vietnamese context. Secondly, the study unveiled individual readiness for change as the underlying mediating mechanism in the relationship between individual mindfulness and affective commitment to change. Thirdly, viewing perceived servant leadership as a conditional factor that regulates the extent of positive feelings from the employees is a unique contribution of this study. On the other hand, from a practical point of view, by emphasizing the important of individual mindfulness and servant leadership in the change process, this study suggests several methods that organizations, managers and HR professionals can do to improve employee’s readiness for change and commitment to change.