Flexible Organisations: Creating a Healthy and Productive Context for Gender and Sexual Minority Employees

It is fairly straightforward to imagine how mindfulness and acceptance skills can help gender and sexual minority (GSM) individuals to live vital and effective lives, even when experiencing difficult circumstances. In an organisational setting, one can even imagine how individual or group training sessions can help to promote mindfulness and acceptance. But what about at the team and organisational levels of the workplace: Can we design teams and organisations that are ‘mindful’ and that can promote mindfulness and acceptance in their employees?

We believe that this is possible through the concepts and techniques that are associated with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999). ACT maintains that a process called psychological flexibility is at the core of helping people to maintain good mental health and behavioural effectiveness. It refers to people’s ability to focus on their current situation, and based upon the opportunities afforded by that situation, take appropriate action towards pursuing their values-based goals, even in the presence of challenging or difficult psychological events (e.g., thoughts, feelings, physiological sensations, images, and memories; Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda & Lillis, 2006). Later in this chapter, we will note how we can use ACT to increase psychological flexibility in GSM employees. First, how can we use the concept of psychological flexibility to create an organisational environment in which these individuals can thrive, both emotionally and in terms of their productivity.