The Dark Side of Mindfulness at Work: How Mindfulness Training Enlivens Machiavellian Incivility

Organizational mindfulness interventions are widely thought to enhance ethical awareness, self-regulation, and prosocial work behavior. Yet emerging research suggests that their effects may be more contingent than commonly assumed. In this paper, I theorize that mindfulness training can yield ethically problematic outcomes for employees who are high in dispositional Machiavellianism. Findings from a large multi-wave field experiment with both active and passive control conditions support this account. Results show that mindfulness training enlivened Machiavellians’ contempt, anger, and disgust (collectively termed affective condemnation ) for their coworkers. This, in turn, translated into higher levels of enacted workplace incivility—a subtle, deniable form of interpersonal mistreatment. By contrast, consistent with Machiavellians’ calculated and reputation-conscious proclivities, the corresponding conditional indirect effect on interpersonal deviance was not significant. These effects remained robust when accounting for generalized negative affect, other dark personality traits, and several theoretically distinct, plausible alternative mechanisms. By identifying Machiavellianism as a critical boundary condition, this research challenges the assumption that organizational mindfulness interventions are ethically neutral or unwaveringly prosocial. More broadly, it reveals that mindfulness training can exert ethically contingent effects by enlivening dispositionally grounded condemnatory affect, underscoring the importance of considering how employee personality shapes the ethical consequences of organizational mindfulness interventions.