Open your eyes for others’ worldviews: How mindfulness meditation at home shapes next-day perspective taking and employees’ functioning.

Can a brief meditation in the evening reshape our understanding of others at work during the next day, thereby enhancing the actor's performance and motivation? To address this question, we examine spillover effects of a brief meditation in the evening on next-day extra-role performance, in-role performance, and work engagement, considering perspective taking as explaining mechanism. Sixty-four participants from different sectors in Germany took part in our within-person field experiment over 10 days, receiving a 7-min mindfulness intervention on 5 days and an active control intervention on the other days. Our results supported a positive effect of the mindfulness intervention on next-day perspective taking, while the control intervention showed no effect. In turn, perspective taking predicted day-specific extra-role performance, in-role performance, and work engagement. The mindfulness intervention exerted significant indirect effects on all outcomes via perspective taking. These results help to clarify how an evening meditation enhances our understanding of others at work, improving performance and motivation. They further support employees in making an informed decision about whether they want to engage in evening meditation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).