Does Leaders’ Mindfulness Benefit Followers? A Meta-analytic Review and Research Agenda

Within leadership research, mindfulness is increasingly viewed as being critical for leadership effectiveness. Central to leadership is the ability to support, motivate, and engage followers – that is, the capacity to have influence. Mindfulness has been proposed as a valuable enabler of effective leadership influence. In this study, we synthesize a growing body of research on mindfulness in leadership contexts by reviewing how and under what conditions mindful leaders influence their followers. We meta-analysed two associations: leaders’ mindfulness and leadership behaviours directed towards followers; and leaders’ mindfulness and follower outcomes (i.e., well-being, performance and leader–follower relations). Based on a pool of 109 studies with 396 effect sizes and 19,887 participants, we found that leaders with higher mindfulness engage in more follower-centred leadership behaviours, such as more transformational and authentic leadership (r = 0.39 [0.22, 0.54]), and as a result have better relations with followers (r = 0.33 [0.25, 0.40]), and have followers with better well-being (r = 0.33 [0.25, 0.41]) and performance (r = 0.35 [0.29, 0.41]). Longitudinal and emerging intervention evidence corroborates this pattern of findings. Key contributions of this review are critically evaluating the quality of existing studies and outlining a research agenda to advance this field.