We examine whether mindfulness can neutralize the negative impact of COVID-19 stressors on employees’ sleep duration and work engagement. In Study 1, we conducted a field experiment in Wuhan, China during the lockdown between February 20, 2020, and March 2, 2020, in which we induced state mindfulness by randomly assigning participants to either a daily mindfulness practice or a daily mind-wandering practice. Results showed that the sleep duration of participants in the mindfulness condition, compared with the control condition, was less impacted by COVID-19 stressors (i.e., the increase of infections in the community). In Study 2, in a 10-day daily diary study in the United Kingdom between June 8, 2020, and June 19, 2020, we replicate our results from Study 1 using a subjective measure of COVID-19 stressors and a daily measure of state mindfulness. In addition, we find that mindfulness buffers the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on work engagement mediated by sleep duration. As the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and the number of reported cases continues to rise globally, our findings suggest that mindfulness is an evidence-based practice that can effectively neutralize the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on sleep and work outcomes. The findings of the present study contribute to the employee stress and well-being literature as well as the emerging organizational research on mindfulness.

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples.

When labeling an infectious disease, officially sanctioned scientific names, e.g., “H1N1 virus,” are recommended over place-specific names, e.g., “Spanish flu.” This is due to concerns from policymakers and the WHO that the latter might lead to unintended stigmatization. However, with little empirical support for such negative consequences, authorities might be focusing on limited resources on an overstated issue. This paper empirically investigates the impact of naming against the current backdrop of the 2019–2020 pandemic. The first hypothesis posited that using place-specific names associated with China (e.g., Wuhan Virus or China Virus) leads to greater levels of sinophobia, the negative stigmatization of Chinese individuals. The second hypothesis posited that using a scientific name (e.g., Coronavirus or COVID-19) leads to increased anxiety, risk aversion, beliefs about contagiousness of the virus, and beliefs about mortality rate. Results from two preregistered studies [N(Study 1) = 504; N(Study 2) = 412], conducted across three countries with the first study during the early outbreak (April 2020) and the second study at a later stage of the pandemic (August 2020), found no evidence of any adverse effects of naming on sinophobia and strong support for the null hypothesis using Bayesian analyses. Moreover, analyses found no impact of naming on anxiety, risk aversion, beliefs about contagiousness of the virus, or beliefs about mortality rate, with mild to strong support for the null hypothesis across outcomes. Exploratory analyses also found no evidence for the effect of naming being moderated by political affiliation. In conclusion, results provide no evidence that virus naming impacted individual’s attitudes toward Chinese individuals or perceptions of the virus, with the majority of analyses finding strong support for the null hypothesis. Therefore, based on the current evidence, it appears that the importance given to naming infectious diseases might be inflated.

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Interest in mindfulness has grown rapidly in recent years. For the period 1986–1996 the number of hits for “mindfulness” in Google Scholar was 4,390. From 1997 to 2007 that number increased eight-fold to 35,300, and from 2008 to 2018 it increased by a factor of 35 to 155,000. In 2010, a peer-reviewed academic journal Mindfulness emerged devoted exclusively to the advancement of mindfulness theory, research, and clinical practice. Between 2014 and 2019 numerous handbooks on various aspects of mindfulness were published, and in October 2015 American Psychologist published a special issue on the topic. Neuroscientific evidence on the benefits of mindfulness meditation is rapidly growing as well, as canvassed by Gotink, et al. 2016 and Tang, et al. 2015. This increase in scholarly attention has been mirrored by a growing interest in mindfulness in society at large. Since the 1980s, the Western world has seen meditation and yoga rise from almost obscurity to a regular part of everyday life for many people, with the number of Americans who engage in such practices in 2012 estimated to be 9.5 percent. Mindfulness training has spread to the business world and is being offered by an increasingly wide array of Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, and General Motors, to name a few. In 2014 Time Magazine featured as its cover story the “Mindful Revolution.” Mindfulness has hit the mainstream. The purpose of this article is to review the key issues and findings in mindfulness research to date, with an emphasis on how it relates to management, organizational behavior, and industrial-organizational psychology. To place the discussion in context, we begin by reviewing definitions of mindfulness, as well as canvassing the historical context from which it has emerged. We then summarize some of the key findings of mindfulness research to date, organized by topic category. In the second half of the chapter, we review the rapidly expanding literature on mindfulness in the workplace, offer theoretical reasons in support of the findings, and highlight potential avenues of future research. We close with what we see as important research issues facing mindfulness scholars. Support for this article was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to the third author.