Mindful You, Relaxed and Beneficial Me: A Daily Diary Study of Coworker Dyads

This daily diary study addresses whether work colleague’s mindfulness at workplace relates to employee’s well-being and performance. Our sample was comprised by 63 couples of coworkers, who filled in quantitative web-based reports twice a day during a whole working week ((N = 126; 1260 occasions). Multilevel analysis was performed, thus showing that colleague’s daily mindfulness at the work context was positively linked to employee’s daily level of relaxation at home. This association was found to be partially mediated by the levels of daily positive affect that employees experienced during their working hours. Additionally, on those days in which employees reported higher levels of positive affect, they tend to foster organizational citizenship behaviours during the following day (colleague-reported). Previous day’s relaxation at home seemed to partially mediate this link. These results are the first ones to show a crossover effect of mindfulness between a couple of work colleagues, thus providing some evidence in favor of the idea that same hierarchical-level agents may benefit from interpersonal associations like the one we present. Moreover, our study expands the flourishing line of research about the within-person dynamics of mindfulness and the way it can be transferred between work and home indistinctively, on a daily basis. Finally, theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.