Collective Mindfulness and Organizational Resilience in Times of Crisis

Abstract

Collective mindfulness acts as an infrastructure of high reliability organizations (HROs), which are organizations that can cope with unexpected events effectively. Organizational resilience describes the ability of organizations to bounce back, adapt, and recover from unpredictable events. Organizational resilience and collective mindfulness are inextricably connected and have specific characteristics related to responding to challenging occurrences. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors of organizational resilience and evaluate the relationship between collective mindfulness and organizational resilience in HROs in times of crisis. A total of 355 usable cross-sectional questionnaires from police officers working in Thailand were used for data analysis. The Mindful Organizing Scale (MOS) was employed to quantify collective mindfulness. The shortened version of the benchmark resilience tool (BRT-13b) was used to test organizational resilience. The structural equation modeling (SEM) method, through Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS), was employed to test the relationship. The current study findings revealed that planning and adaptive capacity are the core components of organizational resilience. Moreover, collective mindfulness has a positive influence on planning and adaptive capacity in a high reliability organization. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed in this paper, along with suggestions for future research.