The role of mindfulness in the management of projects: Potential opportunities in research and practice

Mindfulness is receiving growing attention in the project management community, probably due its proven beneficial effects at individual, team and organization levels in other management domains. Indeed, 80% of the 50 publications identified in this paper were published over the last decade. This review addresses the disparate extant publications related to mindfulness in the field of project management to date and seeks to establish how mindfulness is studied in the management of projects. We first recall the two historical schools of thought, their respective perspective on mindfulness and highlight a recent, reconciling conceptualization of the mindfulness construct termed meta-cognitive practice. Next, we review existing project management works that have included mindfulness theory and categorize them into six main research themes. Project management scholars have studied mindfulness as an enabler of (1) high reliability project organizing, (2) change and innovation, (3) agility and flexibility, (4) mindfulness-based behaviours to be compared with routine-based ones, (5) project actors and project team self-regulation, and (6) megaprojects performance. Third, we provide an overall framework of how mindfulness may benefit the project management field, together with an overall discussion of issues to be addressed. Last, we provide research avenues to foster future research in each of the identified themes. In sum, as the first review on the application of mindfulness in project management research, we contribute to the understanding of how mindfulness can contribute to overall project performance.