Paul D. Bliese

While research has documented the beneficial effects of greater formal as well as informal mindfulness practice in mindfulness training programs, it is less clear what drives informal practice engagement. In a high-stakes occupational context like the military, where performance is paramount, leader behaviors that support mindfulness training may influence individuals' engagement in informal practice. In a study assessing a combined mindfulness training and yoga intervention, 813 soldiers attending 10 weeks of basic combat training were surveyed at two time points about their informal practice of mindfulness and their perceptions of leader support for mindfulness training. More than one third of participants reported engaging in informal practice at least 3 days per week (343 [48.0%] at 4 weeks and 249 [36.9%] at 9 weeks); participants most frequently reported informally practicing when they felt stressed in training or in the barracks. Individuals reporting higher levels of leadership support for mindfulness training were more likely to report engaging in informal practice compared to those with lower levels of leadership support. This analysis controlled for sex, rank, previous mindfulness experience, and overall leadership ratings. The relationship between leader support for mindfulness and informal mindfulness practice was also found when examined in terms of specific practice contexts (e.g., engaging in a task, getting stressed). Exploratory models assessing group-level ratings of leadership resulted in similar findings. Future implementation efforts should further examine the influence of leader support for mindfulness training in the military and other high-stakes occupational contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Research Summary: Academic spin‐off (ASO) performance has been studied in relation to either specific university‐level or regional‐level characteristics. However, ASOs originate from universities, which are embedded in regional ecosystems. This nested structure can create an attribution problem when either level is studied in isolation. Consequently, the relative importance of these two different levels for ASO performance has remained ambiguous. To address this ambiguity, we rely on multi‐level modeling and use a novel, hand‐collected dataset of 3164 ASOs founded between 2010 and 2019 from 212 universities nested within 99 European regions. We find that the region effect matters for about 27% for Return on Assets and 16% for Sales, whereas the university effect is negligible. Our study contributes to research at the nexus of academic entrepreneurship and variance decomposition in strategy. Managerial Summary: Academic spin‐offs (ASOs) bring innovations from the university to the market, thereby potentially generating new sales, employment, and value. However, once formed, their performance prospects vary significantly, and understanding this variance is important for entrepreneurs and policymakers alike. Our findings from a new European dataset reveal that the region effect matters for ASO performance, but the university effect is negligible. This evidence does not imply that universities lack importance; rather, it suggests that universities in a region may have a collective impact that diffuses into regional resources and networks. Our evidence highlights the importance of fostering a supportive regional ecosystem.

In traditional work group settings, individual employees are known to adapt their behavior to that of peers. It is less clear how individuals adapt their behavior in work settings where tasks are independent and the role of social interaction is minimized. This study examines day-to-day performance adaptation among incumbents and newcomers in an automated Fortune 500 e-commerce warehouse where employees work in shifts yet are paid based solely on individual performance. We contribute to performance adaptation literature by exploring whether employees adjust their daily performance based on real-time information from salient others in close physical proximity. Additionally, we extend newcomer socialization research by examining differences in how incumbents and newcomers utilize performance cues from others. We find that incumbent daily performance is more strongly related to that of salient others than is newcomer daily performance. Our findings offer practical insights into an understudied but rapidly growing segment of the workforce. The findings also highlight that social influence continues to play a key role in job performance even in jobs specifically designed to minimize the role of social factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper reports a two-part field experiment study that demonstrates that negative externality primes commonly used in anticorruption campaigns and academic research on collusive corruption are more effective in reducing participation in corruption among the minority of people who already reject the private-public trade-off inherent in collusive corruption than they are in changing the behavior of those who are tolerant of it. Using a random sample of 1,403 residents of Nairobi County, Kenya, we first administered an in-person vignette experiment that measures respondents’ attitudes regarding collusive bribes compared with more coercive types. Collusive bribes are judged more acceptable across multiple outcome measures because they provide the greatest private benefits, but collusive bribes are also rated as the most unethical and at least as harmful to public goods as coercive payments. Several days later, we administered a behavioral experiment to the same respondents, which provided an opportunity to collude with a corrupt representative of the research team to receive illicit additional compensation for participating in the study. A negative externality prime was effective in reducing acceptance of the corrupt opportunity among respondents who rejected the trade-off between self-interested benefits and harming public goods in the vignette experiment. A concluding discussion addresses the high overall acceptance rate of the collusive offer and suggests directions for future interventions. Lastly, we generalize our results to a middle-range theory of organizational misconduct involving transactions between corrupt agents and the public. Funding: This work was supported by the University of South Carolina Sonoco International Business Department’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) [Grant P220A220013-23], received from the U.S. Department of Education. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18659 .

Despite the prevalence of research on the consequences of collective turnover (TO), we lack an understanding of how, when, and why changes in the external environment influence collective turnover. The present study extends context emergent turnover and threat-rigidity theories to consider temporal changes in rates of collective turnover brought on by an external disruption. We also conduct variance decomposition to evaluate the relative influence of internal and external factors on collective turnover and examine how changes in the external environment impact relative influences. Finally, we examine the role of collective engagement in explaining patterns of collective turnover over time. Our study is based on a large, geographically dispersed U.S. firm. Findings from a two-phase longitudinal model reveal that rates of collective turnover change over time in ways that are predictable from threat-rigidity theory. Variance decomposition analysis finds that internal store-level factors explain substantially more variance than external factors, but the balance changes in response to an external disruption. We also show that collective engagement can mitigate increases in collective turnover. Results inform theory regarding the relative importance of internal versus external factors in influencing collective turnover and provide a framework for predicting how contextual change in the external environment impacts collective turnover over time.

As part of an Army pilot program, mandatory annual wellness checks were initiated to introduce individuals to counseling and to support psychological resilience and thriving. The program was evaluated using a cross-sectional survey completed by 7,831 soldiers. Findings revealed that about half of soldiers who reported a wellness check rated the check at least moderately helpful in their professional and personal lives. Participants receiving a wellness check reported being more likely to report willingness to seek help if they were to have mental health problems and to report higher levels of resilience and thriving even after controlling for rank, age, education, months in the unit, and trait negative affect. Participants were also less likely to report stigma-related concerns compared to those who had not received a wellness check. Consistent with theory on the common factors in counseling and the contextual model of psychotherapy (Laska et al., 2014), feeling listened to and learning new skills partially mediated the association between perceived wellness check usefulness and study outcomes, although acquiring a new perspective about problems did not. While not a randomized trial, this evaluation suggests that wellness checks are associated with programmatic goals: improved attitudes toward care seeking, resilience, and thriving. Future work should consider ways to ensure counselors address therapeutic common factors and should use a randomized, longitudinal design. Study findings have implications for implementing programs like wellness checks for military personnel and others working in high-stress occupations like first responders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We extend event system theory (EST) to conceptualize proactive events and examine how event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption are related to two phases of change associated with an organizationally initiated event. Specifically, we explore the impact of a new sustainability monitoring system on energy consumption using longitudinal archival data from 87 manufacturing units of a Fortune 200 multinational firm. We use a variant of mixed-effects discontinuous growth modeling (DGM) to test EST propositions related to initial and longer-term changes associated with implementing the monitoring system. Results indicate that while the new sustainability monitoring system is effective in reducing within-unit energy consumption on average, there are significant differences in change magnitude between units. The magnitude of change during the pre-post phase was related to between-unit differences in event duration, timing, criticality, and disruption. Longer-term change patterns were related to between-unit differences in managerial criticality behaviors. The results empirically validate several of EST’s core propositions and provide an illustration of how DGM can be modified to study events that vary in onset and duration across entities.