Reflection and Mindfulness in Organizations: Rationales and Possibilities for Integration

Abstract

The notion of reflection has featured strongly in Management Learning in recent years. While there is an important body of knowledge on how organizations can foster reflection-on-action, less seems to be known about how they can promote reflection-in-action. We suggest that reflection-in-action is closely linked to the phenomenon of mindfulness and we outline what existing research on mindfulness may teach us about understanding and organizing reflection-in-action. We believe that integrating the perspectives taken in these two streams of literature is important for a clear understanding of why some organizations seem to learn ‘better’ than others and why some initiatives to promote reflection and learning are more successful than others.