Recent research lead by INSEAD concluded that while a standard executive education approach failed to increase the likelihood of managers making socially responsible business decisions, meditation based coaching programs showed a significant impact on the probability to act in a socially responsible way.
Read the Executive Summary, Conclusions and to access the whole report here
A brief selected summary of key findings and recommendations:
- This was part of a three-year study into the alignment of society’s expectations with managers’ understanding of their company responsibilities.
- The study used randomised matched pair samples with control and placebo groups and looked at the effectiveness of different types of training in “facilitating the development responsible behaviour in [93] managers [in four companies]”.
- The meditation part involved six weeks of two-weekly sessions of 45 minutes at the office – a total of 9 contact hours, plus recommended daily practice.
Results suggest that:
- “The standard executive education approach based on engaged discussion and case analyses fails to facilitate managers to shift towards higher probabilities to make socially responsible decisions.”
- “On the other hand, coaching programs based on introspection and meditation techniques, without any discussion about CSR topics, exhibit a significant impact on both the probability to act in a socially responsible way and on the factors that influence the probability to behave that way.”
- Particularly significant was the move from seeing responsibility as ‘avoiding harm’ toward seeing it as pro-actively ‘doing good’.
- Decision making criteria showed a significant shift from “broadly self interest minded” (e.g. firm, profit, reputation and personal interests) towards emotional (“shows caring and compassion”) and ethical (“breach of an implicit social contract”) strands.
- General decision making criteria related to possible trade offs in day to day work and decision making showed significant shifts:
- From focus on economic profit toward social welfare
- From focus on internal audiences toward external audience’s interests
- From focus on productivity toward impact on the natural environment
- A significant shift in personal values report from: “preserve my public image” to “self transcendent values (e.g. wisdom, responsibility etc).
[Overall this does suggest that meditation has a number of implications and applications in organisations beyond the simple ’stress reduction’ approaches that many people associated it with.]
