Chapter 7: Leader Mindfulness and Ethical Decision Making

The ancient Buddhist concept of mindfulness increasingly becomes popular in Western management practice. In the present chapter, we introduce the mindfulness concept into the leadership literature and offer a preliminary analysis of its importance in the context of leader ethical decision making. To explain how leader mindfulness affects leader ethical decision making, we draw on findings in clinical psychology and delineate the processes triggered by mindfulness: the metamechanism of reperceiving and the additional direct effects of (a) compassion and interbeing, (b) cognitive flexibility and insight, and (c) integrated functioning. These processes are argued to help leaders develop an integrative stakeholder-oriented, values-based original solution when faced with an intricate moral dilemma. We illustrate our argumentation by drawing on the Levi Strauss case of child labor in Bangladesh.