Paying Attention to Mindfulness and Its Effects on Task Performance in the Workplace

Abstract

Although the concept of mindfulness has attracted scholarly attention across multiple disciplines, research on mindfulness in the field of management remains limited. In particular, little research in this field has examined the nature of mindfulness and whether it relates to task performance in organizational and occupational settings. Filling these gaps, the present article delineates mindfulness by (a) defining it as a state of consciousness in which attention is focused on present-moment phenomena occurring both externally and internally, (b) comparing it to a range of other attention-related concepts, and (c) developing theory concerning the factors that determine when mindfulness is beneficial versus costly from a task performance standpoint.