Relationship of Mindfulness and Cognitive Defusion to Burnout, Openness to Change and Adaptive Performance with Mediating role of Psychological Flexibility: A Case Study of Iran South Railway Company

The purpose of this study was to design and test a model of the relationship of mindfulness and cognitive defusion to burnout, openness to change, and adaptive performance, considering the role of psychological flexibility. Participants consisted of 220 employees (186 men and 34 women) from Iran South Railway Company who was selected by stratified random sampling method. The instruments were acceptance and action questionnaire (Hayes et al., 2004), Mindful attention and awareness scale (Brown and Ryan, 2003), Openness to change questionnaire (Metselaar, 1997; Rossel, 2010), Adaptive Performance Questionnaire (Charbonnier–Voirin et al., 2010), Burnout Questionnaire (Maslach, 1981), and Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire (Gillanders et al., 2014). The proposed model was tested through structural equation modeling. Findings showed that the proposed model was fitted to the data. Better fitness was found through the removal of two non-significant paths and making correlation between two errors. The results indicated that psychological flexibility had a meditating role between mindfulness and cognitive defusion with adaptive performance, openness to change and burnout. Therefore, mindfulness training and acceptance and commitment training programs can be a good way to increase adaptive adaptation and greater acceptance of employees against organizational changes and, as well as reducing job burnout in the workplace. Finally, research findings were discussed based on acceptance and commitment therapy.