From Scarce Resources to Resourcing Spirals: A Theory of Mindful Resourcing

People in organizations often face demands in excess of their resources. Psychological theories of resources reflect this scarcity, emphasizing how people conserve or balance resources. While they acknowledge that interventions like mindfulness training can create resources, these theories struggle to explain how, as they assume that resources are necessarily scarce. In this study, we introduce a theory of mindful resourcing. Rather than reducing mindfulness to a scarce psychological resource that a person has, it reveals mindfulness to be a skillful practice that a person does to enhance their agency to create resources. Mindful resourcing theory shows how mindfulness skills form a foundation for resourcing—the ability to create and enact resources—and how resourcing reciprocally enhances mindfulness skills, such that the practices of mindfulness and resourcing intertwine as mutually sustaining and supporting practices. We develop this theory across a three-phase research design that (1) introduces a conceptual model which sequences how these practices intertwine and (2) uses this sequencing to surface the otherwise implicit design structure of mindfulness trainings, before (3) abductively building theory on how people enact and develop competence in mindful resourcing from longitudinal qualitative data of 98 non-profit employees undergoing training. Our theory-building discovers the critical role of resourcing spirals—showing how employees create and enact resources by skillfully assembling spirals and recursively expanding those spirals into longer and more impactful sequences as they gain competence. Taken together, our study illuminates the understudied human activities by which people not only create and enact resources but learn to do so more mindfully.