Does closeness built in a circle carry into people’s existing relationships?
When work becomes meditation: how managers use work as a tool for personal growth
Adjacent
Seven CEOs and business owners, followed for two years, brought a meditative attitude to hard situations at work. Their focus shifted from attending to suffering, to witnessing what is, to responding with authenticity.
Meditation, the study argues, builds the capacity to see a situation in a different light, and work is where that capacity can be practised and embodied in real time. The material comes from a clinical inquiry, in which the researcher helps participants with issues they bring and the helping generates the data; the group version of the method is described in Lychnell & Mårtensson (2017).
It approaches the question of transfer beyond the room from another practice: how a way of attending, practised on purpose, is carried into ordinary situations.
What it doesn’t show
Seven managers already committed to spiritual development, studied qualitatively. It describes a process rather than measuring change, and the practice is meditation, not a relational one.
Summary based on the abstract.
Directions that build on it
- Transfer beyond the room
Links
Cite
Lychnell, L. (2017). When work becomes meditation: how managers use work as a tool for personal growth. Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 14(3), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766086.2017.1307782