Mindfulness at Work

Interest in mindfulness has grown rapidly in recent years. For the period 1986–1996 the number of hits for “mindfulness” in Google Scholar was 4,390. From 1997 to 2007 that number increased eight-fold to 35,300, and from 2008 to 2018 it increased by a factor of 35 to 155,000. In 2010, a peer-reviewed academic journal Mindfulness emerged devoted exclusively to the advancement of mindfulness theory, research, and clinical practice. Between 2014 and 2019 numerous handbooks on various aspects of mindfulness were published, and in October 2015 American Psychologist published a special issue on the topic. Neuroscientific evidence on the benefits of mindfulness meditation is rapidly growing as well, as canvassed by Gotink, et al. 2016 and Tang, et al. 2015. This increase in scholarly attention has been mirrored by a growing interest in mindfulness in society at large. Since the 1980s, the Western world has seen meditation and yoga rise from almost obscurity to a regular part of everyday life for many people, with the number of Americans who engage in such practices in 2012 estimated to be 9.5 percent. Mindfulness training has spread to the business world and is being offered by an increasingly wide array of Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, and General Motors, to name a few. In 2014 Time Magazine featured as its cover story the “Mindful Revolution.” Mindfulness has hit the mainstream. The purpose of this article is to review the key issues and findings in mindfulness research to date, with an emphasis on how it relates to management, organizational behavior, and industrial-organizational psychology. To place the discussion in context, we begin by reviewing definitions of mindfulness, as well as canvassing the historical context from which it has emerged. We then summarize some of the key findings of mindfulness research to date, organized by topic category. In the second half of the chapter, we review the rapidly expanding literature on mindfulness in the workplace, offer theoretical reasons in support of the findings, and highlight potential avenues of future research. We close with what we see as important research issues facing mindfulness scholars. Support for this article was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to the third author.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.