Can mindfulness be helpful in team decision-making? A framework for understanding how to mitigate false consensus

Abstract

Mindfulness has recently attracted a great deal of interest in the field of management. However, even though mindfulness - broadly viewed as a state of active awareness - has been described mainly at the individual level, it may also have important effects at aggregated levels. In this article, we adopt a team-based conceptualization of mindfulness, and develop a framework that represents the powerful effect of team mindfulness on facilitating effective decision-making. We further discuss how a conceptualization of team mindfulness may mitigate the process of false consensus by interacting positively with the following five central team processes: open-mindedness, participation, empowerment, conflict management, and value and ambiguity tolerance. A false consensus constitutes a cognitive bias, leading to the perception of a consensus that does not exist. In essence, we argue that, although a conceptualization of team mindfulness does not guarantee effective decision-making in itself, it may successfully reduce false consensus when coupled with these five team processes. Accordingly, this article contributes to the theory and practice of team decision-making by demonstrating how a conceptualization of team mindfulness can be helpful in the increasingly complex and ambiguous situations faced by contemporary teams.