Practicing mindfulness as a means for enhancing workplace pro-environmental behaviors among managers

As ecological concerns become pressing, attempts to address these remain limited to enforcing laws, while alternative ways of encouraging workplace pro-environmental behaviors (WPEBs), such as cultivating mindfulness, remain unexplored. Informed by theories of PEBs from OB-IO literature, we offer propositions detailing the role that practicing mindfulness plays in (directly and indirectly) enhancing managerial propensity to engage in WPEBs. Our paper contributes to extant literature: (1) on theories of PEBs, by showing that some of the same theories that apply to the private domain also hold for commercial organizations; (2) relating mindfulness to PEBs, by expanding the exploration from personal and consumer domains to managerial contexts; and (3) on interventions to enhance WPEBs, by exposing the underlying mechanism of ‘how’ practicing mindfulness enhances managerial engagement in WPEBs. We call for companies to offer more mindfulness-based training programs to employees, since such initiatives complement laws and other interventions in supporting WPEBs.