Reimagining Faith and Management

The Impact of Faith in the Workplace

Edwina Pio, Robert Kilpatrick, Timothy Pratt, Edwina Pio, Robert Kilpatrick, Timothy Pratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000365177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Much contemporary research ignores or is dismissive of the growth of global religiosity, even though 90 percentof the global population sees the world through a commitment to some kind of faith. Reimagining Faith and Management addresses this issue and extends the research on the impact of faith in various aspects of management, such as negotiation, leadership, entrepreneurship, governance, innovation, ethics, finance and careers.

Faith impacts how individuals and organisations envision, manage and respond to their various stakeholders, communities, the natural environment and the world around them. This book presents various facets of how faith, values and/or ideological outlook which informs, influences and adds mystery to inspire and impel individuals and organisations. The 21 chapters are based on academic research and offer practical managerial recommendations. The book is divided into three sections: faithful futures impacting individuals; faithful futures impacting organisations and faithful futures impacting society.

Each chapter presents a theoretical base and includes practical implications. The book is ideal reading for educators, practitioners, researchers and students of business, management, career studies, faith-based organisations, corporate governance and business ethics, as well as religious studies, including applied theology.

1
Introduction

Edwina Pio, Robert Kilpatrick and Timothy Pratt

So many believe throughout life

That good will be born from the strife

No matter the perils

Or all that bedevils

Their faith a trusted midwife

Godfrey D’Lima

Faith is a broad, multifaceted concept overflowing with life. In this book faith is described as forming part of religion, yet it is dynamic, transcending codes and doctrines. Equally, faith may be contained within notions of spirituality, but it is not regulated by them. Indeed, faith may be found within religion, spirituality, ideology and philosophy, yet its essence surpasses each of these. Faith is the breath, the mystery, the energy and the spirit that undergirds a person’s passage through life and underwrites their sense of meaning, purpose and hope. When faith is defined more broadly than religion or spirituality, then reimagining its effects on management and infusions of the ‘mysterious’, can muster the strength and vitality to stride across the management stage, rather than hiding nervously and apologetically in organisations. In creating a world we want to see, the fingerprints of faith can compellingly magnetise our understandings beyond the obsession with growth, capitalism and consumerism. In reflecting a sliver of the harmony of the cosmos, our book Reimagining Faith and Management – Implications for the workplace is an imperfectly perfect endeavour in this regard.

Late last century, after many years and various attempts at achieving ‘development’ with what can only be called ‘mixed results’, the World Bank gathered together various heads of global religions to begin a process they called the ‘World Faiths Development Dialogue’ (The Berkley Centre for Peace, 2009), which continues to this day. It had two key objectives: to reinforce, underscore, and publicise the synergies and common purpose of religions and development institutions addressing poverty; and to explore issues on which there is little consensus and where common ground is unclear. What began as a process of engaging religions to become distribution arms of various initiatives in economic development has morphed into realising the need of engaging those same organisations on the much more difficult task of effecting a worldview transformation, a process in which religious communities have developed expertise over thousands of years. This is especially pertinent for our globe where unchecked corporate greed and unsustainable resource consumption are producing a growing environmental crisis with attendant human stressors.

Merelo (2019) argues that the ‘home world’ we inhabit provides us with comforting notions of familiarity limiting our thinking into the paramount reality of everyday life, a life that is not only deeply cherished but also sought after since it represents a source of permanence to social life. Accordingly, woven through the chapters of this book, the authors collectively unearth an extensive kaleidoscope of understandings concerning faith. This wealth of understandings includes authors writing from within the context of a specific religion, emphasis on a universal spirituality, an interfaith approach and concerns with an ideology, philosophy or belief such as acting ethically, or in the interests of environmental sustainability.

Weber (2008) considered the work of an individual as a spiritual vocation, with religion and the Protestant work ethic underpinning society’s economic drive. The effect of faith on the business world is possibly related to what that faith sees as the object of its worship and its hope and obedience – although a linear connection is open to question (Schramm, 2013, p. 836). Since Weber, academic discourse on faith and management has steadily expanded. Literature includes the construct of Servant Leadership (Greenleaf, 1977), which Spears (1995) suggests includes the skills of listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualisation, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people and building community. Similarly, there is the construct of spiritual leadership, which Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2003) posit involves developing an organisational vision that fosters employees’ sense of calling and for finding meaning or life purpose within one’s career. For many individuals, their career is seen as a calling which enables a more meaningful life, often consistent with religious traditions (Pio, Kilpatrick, & Pratt, 2018). Fry (2003) asserted that adopting such an approach leads to reduced employee absence rates, turnover, mortality and workplace stress. More latterly, literature at the intersection of faith and management has been directed towards issues associated with inclusion and accommodation of religious expression within the workplace, and specifically among minority religions (Pio, 2014; Pio & Pratt, 2017; Pio & Syed, 2018).

Arguably, even agnostic science can sometimes become ‘an implicit dogma … approach[ing] the level of religious belief’ (Øyen, Vaage, & Lund-Olsen, 2012, p. 18). The demonstrated effect of faith impacting business practice in measurable ways has been highlighted by various researchers (Cao, 2007; Li & Bond, 2010; Madsen, 1998; Minami, Miller, Davey, & Swalhah, 2011), with aspects of innovation being linked to complex aspects of faith (Assouad & Parboteeah, 2018). Religious beliefs through their influence on individual traits positively influence the various dimensions of economic performance (Barro & McCleary, 2003). Globally, social and economic development organisations are often faith-based, and they contribute to various forms of development, highlighting the importance of faith-based actors and the key role of faith in international development (Heist & Cnaan, 2016). While some such as Dawkins (2006) contend faith an anathema, international evidence suggests that a diversity of faith adherents will continue across the world. Despite a wide spectrum of belief and practice in various religions, in a study of 198 countries and territories and population growth projections, 2010–2015, by the Pew Research Centre (2015), the unaffiliated will shrink as a share of the world’s population, and religious switching is likely to be a factor in the growth of various religious groups. For example, by 2035, babies born to Muslims will start to outnumber those born to Christians, with a young Christian population continuing to grow in the sub-Saharan region of Africa (Pew Research Centre, 2017), thus changing religious demography globally. Manderson, Smith, and Tomlinson (2012) assert the development of this religious interest can be attributed to a combination of migration, trade, missionary endeavour, tourism and the growth of information technology that is utilised to communicate respective religious messages. King (2008) adds to this list, the impact of an aging population confronted with their own mortality. In ‘The Global God Divide’ (Pew Research Center, 2020), individuals 50 years or older were more likely to have a belief in God as a necessity for morality, rather than those aged 18 to 29 years. Additionally, the same report notes that, in many countries, the more educated a person was, the less likely they were to believe that God was necessary to have good values – but the majority of respondents surveyed stated that religion and the role of God and prayer were important to them.

For many, faith in the workplace is not only irrelevant, but counterproductive. Yet around 90 percent of the world’s population practice some religious faith (O’Brien & Palmer, 2007). It seems somewhat remiss, perhaps even careless, in such a religious world, that the impact of faith and its expression in spiritual practice should be treated with relative indifference by many in the managerial world. This is especially true amidst the problems facing humanity and the rising calls for business to benefit all humanity as well as the planet on which we live (Pio, 2014). Faith components can challenge economic life (Kilpatrick, 2017), including the difficulty of achieving good economic development outcomes, if faith issues are left unaddressed (Harr & Wolfensohn, 2011). Gundolf and Filser (2013) identify three dominant themes addressed within faith and management literature as: (1) best practices regarding performance issues and productivity, (2) religion at work and (3) the impact of faith on personal ethics. For example, religions influence corporate community involvement through funding of various charities and public–private partnerships as part of the broad domain of corporate social responsibility (Cui, Jo, & Velasquez, 2019). Or in the context of another study, Christians seem to be more pro-market than those who are not religious (Jones, Hadsell, & Burrus Jr., 2019).

Many workplaces encompass significant ethnic and cultural diversity along with a multiplicity of spiritualities and faith adherents. This multiplicity is often seen as posing a danger to the unity, communication and overall collective harmony of the workplace. Academic research has documented how signalling one religion or faith-based tradition, is often perceived as disruptive to the status quo of multicultural societies and their workplaces (Khattab, Miaari, Mohamed-Ali, & Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2019). Identifiers signalling a foreign faith such as a veil, a turban or a yarmulke are normally received with scepticism and suspicion in many workplaces. In fact, research supports the idea that members of religious minorities wearing these types of identifiers experience more prejudice in the workplace (Ghumman & Jackson, 2008, 2010). But there are times when identities are impossible to mask since they are ingrained within the self in more pervasive and complex forms. When this happens ‘otherness’ becomes not only evident but disruptive of the perceived secular stability of the working environment. Hicks (2003) makes a compelling argument when illustrating how explanations of Western workplace secularism fall short whenever traditions, such as Christmas functions, Easter breaks, and non-working Sundays are experienced through the eyes of workers whose cultural and religious backgrounds have little commonality with such traditions. Yet, the shared conceptions of the workplace in some multicultural societies, such as New Zealand, UK and the United States, can hardly be understood outside the underlying values and assumptions of the different forms of Christianity and their related ethics (Benefiel, Fry, & Geigle, 2014). Cadge and Konieczny (2014) note that although often denied under false pretences of secularism, these legacies of religion are hidden in plain sight.

A person’s faith affects their worldview and how they manage and do bus...