Mindfulness in Organizations

This chapter discusses the practice of mindfulness in organizations. In the first section we describe the growing interest in mindfulness training among organizations and discuss possible reasons for this development. We then review work on the definition and concept of mindfulness as they have been developed in psychology and organizational scholarship. In the second section, we discuss different forms of mindfulness practice in organizations, including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as the most prominent. The third section reviews empirical evidence on the effects of mindfulness on work-related outcomes and processes such as employee performance, employee wellbeing, leadership, and ethical decision making. We then discuss in more detail a recently developed self-administered mindfulness training program as it contains some unique and interesting features relevant to mindfulness intervention studies. In the fifth section, we present the results from qualitative interviews we conducted with participants of a corporate mindfulness training program. We conclude that the study and application of mindfulness in the workplace offers many promising directions; however, much more research is needed to create a basis of evidence for successful mindfulness training programs. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the (intended and unintended) consequences, mediating mechanisms, moderating factors, and boundary conditions of mindfulness would benefit organizational scholarship.