How Leaders and Their Teams Jointly Shape Leadership Behaviors When Being Congruent in Mindfulness

Leading transformational by attuning to individuals’ needs is crucial to help teams collectively perform. Being mindful matters in this regard because it allows both leaders and their teams to be more receptive to each other and better change perspectives to come up with non-intuitive solutions. Although the bright side of regularly pausing and making sense of current experiences is well-established, recent findings call into question whether a more in mindfulness available to leaders and their teams really benefits their performance. Knowledge about the true value of mindfulness in teams is yet critical because today’s tasks are seldom solved individually. Based on supplementary fit logic, we theorize that whether the mindfulness of leaders and their teams becomes an asset is by no means guaranteed but depends on how well both fit together to co-create leaders’ individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation. We suggest that mindful leaders require mindful teams for leveraging better collective performances through leadership behaviors. We test this theory based on multi-respondent data from 98 work teams and find that teams ultimately perform more effectively and innovatively the more congruent leader and team mindfulness are. We discuss the implications of this co-creation of leadership due to leader–team mindfulness congruence.