Research pick: Managing mindfulness - "Mindfulness and well-being in management students: analysing the moderating role of gender in corona times"

How have mindfulness and well-being sat with adult management students during the COVID-19 pandemic? And, does gender have a moderaring role? These are two pertinent questions for our current age that are answered in the International Journal of Knowledge and Learning.

Teena Bharti of the Indian Institute of Management Bodh Gaya in Uruvela, Bihar, India, has considered an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our future managers and business leaders. The pandemic has had not only an incredibly wide-ranging impact on health across the globe but also on commerce and the economy. Bharti surveyed almost 500 adult management students to explore how mindfulness among them influenced their personal well-being and how gender affected the link between these two traits.

Put simply, the research suggests that mindfulness did indeed lead to greater well-being among the students. Moreover, female students were found to be more mindful and so generally showed greater well-being during these rather troubled times. The findings suggest that offering students guidance in how to be more mindful, might help them cope better with the stresses and strains felt while studying during a crisis. Perhaps the same guidance might even be beneficial to students in other disciplines and indeed the wider public.

Mindfulness is generally thought of as allowing oneself to have one-focus attention. It essentially involves allowing oneself not to be distracted from one’s present activity and place by thoughts about other circumstances, the past, nor the future while immersed in that activity or place. It is a key component of many philosophies and is often considered a life skill that can improve one’s mental wellbeing or at the very least, if not improve, then help to reduce the risk of problems arising in stressful circumstances.

Bharti concludes that “moment-to-moment attention [mindfulness] induces subjective well-being and is very relevant in coping with the contingent times (covid pandemic in this case), loneliness, and other psychological issues.”

Bharti, T. (2022) ‘Mindfulness and well-being in management students: analysing the moderating role of gender in corona times’, Int. J. Knowledge and Learning, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp.359–372.