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The double-edged sword effect of leader mindfulness on employee taking charge

Xiuming Sun,Zhenting Xu,Lin Liu

Published 2025 in BMC Psychology

ABSTRACT

Leadership is a crucial factor influencing employee taking charge, which plays a critical role in organizational survival and success in the VUCA (variability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) era, while previous studies have neglected the influence of leader mindfulness on taking charge. Moreover, most studies have extensively focused on the positive effects of leadership on employee taking charge, with insufficient exploration of the diverse mechanisms in different cultural contexts. Therefore, drawing on the social information processing theory, this study examined the double-edged sword effect of leader mindfulness on employee taking charge in the context of Chinese culture, along with investigating the mediating role of psychological capital and ego depletion and the moderating role of Zhongyong thinking. This study used a random sampling method to collect questionnaires. Accordingly, the data were collected from 335 employees in China, with the valid response rate standing at 79.8%. Additionally, the hypotheses were tested via a hierarchical linear model and bootstrapping analysis outlined by Hayes. The findings indicate that leader mindfulness demonstrates a double-edged sword effect on employee taking charge. On the one hand, leader mindfulness encourages employees to take charge through enhanced psychological capital; whereas on the other hand, leader mindfulness inhibits employees from taking charge through triggered ego depletion. Furthermore, Zhongyong thinking plays a moderating role in the relationship between leadership mindfulness and psychological capital, as well as in the relationship between mindful leadership and ego depletion, respectively. This study advances the the extant literature on leader mindfulness and employee taking charge by reflecting the “double-edged sword” effect of leader mindfulness on employee taking charge from the perspective of social information processing, and establishing the important boundary conditions of the relationship between leader mindfulness and employee taking charge within the Chinese context, as well as emphasizing the theoretical exploration of leadership and employee proactive behavior.

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