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.