The Question

Mindfulness has attracted growing research attention as a leadership quality. Zhou and colleagues (2023) conducted a meta-analysis synthesising 54 independent samples and 9,414 leaders to examine what leader mindfulness is actually associated with, and whether mindfulness interventions for leaders work.

What They Found

Leader mindfulness was significantly associated with leader wellbeing, including reduced stress; with relationship quality and leadership style; with leader job performance; and with follower wellbeing and job performance (Zhou et al., 2023). The pattern suggests that mindfulness operates as a genuinely systemic quality in leadership contexts, affecting not just the leader but the people being led.

On the intervention side, mindfulness interventions showed strong support for improving leader wellbeing, with significant differences between leader mindfulness levels before and after intervention. The difference between intervention and control groups on post-test scores was not statistically significant, though the effect was in the predicted direction (Zhou et al., 2023). This is an important qualification: within-person improvement does not necessarily mean the intervention group ended up more mindful than the control group, a higher standard that the current evidence does not fully meet.

Connecting to the Broader Picture

The leadership mindfulness findings complement and extend the bright triad framework reviewed earlier in this series (Nilsson & Kazemi, 2022), which also drew on contemplative psychology to characterise positive leadership. The meta-analytic evidence here provides empirical grounding for the association between mindful leadership qualities and positive outcomes, while the intervention findings suggest that these qualities can be developed, though the evidence for intervention effectiveness is stronger for wellbeing outcomes than for performance or relational outcomes (Zhou et al., 2023).

Reference

Zhou, Y., Wang, M., & Sin, H. (2023). Being “there and aware”: A meta-analysis of the literature on leader mindfulness. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 32(3), 299–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2022.2150170