Mindfulness courses have become a common part of employee wellbeing schemes, promising calmer minds and better work. What leads people to be mindful at work, and what it brings, is less well understood. A new review of 93 studies suggests that mindfulness at work is linked to better performance, relationships and wellbeing, yet research on what drives it remains thin.
Researchers at the University of Delhi combined a bibliometric analysis, which maps trends across a body of literature, with a systematic review. The findings appear in BMC Psychology. They screened studies published between 2014 and 2025 using PRISMA, a standard guide to reporting reviews, and included 93.
The team chose 2014 as the starting point because workplace mindfulness research grew rapidly after that year. They looked at what comes before mindfulness, the ways it is practised, and what follows from it. The review was registered retrospectively on the Open Science Framework.
Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to the present moment with openness and without judgement. Antecedents are the factors that come before it, such as personal traits, training or the work environment. Workplace outcomes include job performance, relationships with colleagues, health and work-life balance.
The review found positive links between mindfulness and workplace outcomes, including performance, relationships and wellbeing. It also found that few studies have examined the antecedents, meaning what makes some employees more mindful than others. The authors describe this as a paucity of research. Taken together, the studies suggest that practising mindfulness can be good for individuals and for the organisations that employ them, although the review does not measure how large those benefits are.
Eastern perspectives were under-represented. Much of the workplace literature takes a Western view of mindfulness, even though the practice has roots in Eastern traditions. The authors argue that bringing these ideas into research could widen understanding of how mindfulness works in organisations.
From the 93 studies, the team proposed a conceptual model linking antecedents, different forms of mindfulness and outcomes. The model is employee-focused, organising the workplace factors that may encourage mindfulness, the forms it takes, and the functional and moral outcomes that follow. They also suggest that mindfulness may act as a strategic resource, helping to support ethical and sustainable workplaces as well as individual health. They set out an agenda for future work on long-term effects and cultural differences.
The study has clear limits. As a literature review, it does not pool results into a single effect size, so it cannot say how large the benefits are or prove that mindfulness causes them. The proposed model has yet to be tested, and the evidence is limited to published research.
Earlier reviews of workplace programmes have reported improvements in stress and wellbeing. This review suggests that the next step is to understand what makes employees mindful in the first place, and to include non-Western ideas.
