Workplace Spirituality

Making a Difference

Yochanan Altman, Judi Neal, Wolfgang Mayrhofer, Yochanan Altman, Judi Neal, Wolfgang Mayrhofer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783110711295
• eBook ISBN: 9783110711400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Workplace spirituality is an emerging field of study and practice and this book asks the questions: Where have we been in the last ten years as a field and where should we be headed in the next ten years? The editors asked these questions of thought leaders from around the globe, leaders who represent different sectors, faith traditions, worldviews and organizational functions.

This volume represents the best of current thinking about the state of the field of workplace spirituality and of what the future holds. There are four themes: (1) management themes such as leadership, ethics, change management, and diversity; (2) workplace spirituality in sectors such as health and wellbeing, policing and creative industries, (3) key issues that are emerging, such as self-spirituality, mindfulness, storytelling and the importance of nature, and (4) cutting edge epistemologies and methodologies including indigenous studies, relational ontology, ethnography, and psychodynamics. These articles were chosen to provoke new thinking, new research, and new practice in the field of workplace spirituality, with the goal of helping the field mature in the next decade.

Themes

3 Leadership and Spirituality

Roger Gill

Introduction

The major challenges facing humanity in the third decade of the twenty-first century are spiritual in nature. In meeting them successfully, leadership – spiritual leadership in particular – holds the key. How, then, do spirituality and leadership relate to each other? And how do they together contribute to the performance and well-being of people at work? Let is first consider what they have in common? One answer is that neither term has a single, universally accepted definition. The consequence is that discussion and research concerning spirituality or leadership, or the relationship between them, are at best at high risk of being fragmented and confusing and at the worst fruitless. One antidote to this problem is that any discussion or research concerning spirituality and leadership starts with a proposal for a clear and precise definition of each term and a justification for it.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the state of the art in this field, the challenges ahead, and some suggestions for further research. In doing this I aim to show how spirituality is fundamental to ethical and effective leadership and how spiritual leadership is a development of “conventional” concepts of leadership and spirituality and, as a result, our hope for the future of humanity.

What is Leadership?

It is commonly said that there are as many definitions of leadership as there are those defining it, and they come from a diverse range of backgrounds – politics, business, public service, the armed forces, sport, the media, the arts and, not least, academia. The quest for a general theory of leadership has been a challenging one and unsuccessful so far but a fascinating and useful one (Goethals & Sorenson, 2006). The least we can do is to say what we mean by the term and then write about it, as I do with “spirituality”. Leadership, like spirituality, and indeed many words, such as beauty and love, is what I call a “Humpty Dumpty” word:

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master – that’s all.

(Carroll, 1871, p. 87)

My definition, then, is that leadership is showing the way and helping or inducing others to pursue it (Gill, 2011, p. 9). The rationale for this I present elsewhere in detail (Gill, 2011, pp. 2–11). In brief, this is, first, that it draws on its etymology, which in this particular case eschews the well-known “etymological fallacy” simply because it is very helpful to do so: etymology can aid clarification where there is confusion and the development of helpful conventions. Second, it represents a distillation of the wide range of extant definitions that have led to misunderstanding and confusion. Leadership is very much more than the basic and most common definition: “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (Northouse, 2013, p. 5). In my model (Gill, 2011, pp. 99–106), showing the way and helping or inducing others to pursue it entails envisioning a desirable future (a vision); promoting a clear purpose or mission, supportive values and intelligent strategies; and empowering and engaging all those concerned – six core themes and practices (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1: A model of six core themes and practices of leadership (Gill, 2011, p. 101).

An initial version of this model (Gill, 2006) has been independently validated (Rupprecht et al., 2013), and the development and validation of the revised version is underway.

Research into how long-term well-being develops has revealed that job resources predict a high level of job-related well-being. Baran Metin and colleagues (Metin et al., 2016) investigated aspects of empowerment focusing on the relationship between work resources such as autonomy, management and colleague support, and knowledge and skills together with job demands and employee engagement and the role of authenticity – employees’ ability to experience their “true selves”. They found that authenticity was positively associated with engagement, job satisfaction and job performance and it was also a mediator between job resources (empowerment) and those outcomes.

Research on job resources has explored job control (autonomy and participation in decision making) and supportiveness of the organizational climate in terms of perceptions of the quality of communications and social support (Mäkikangas et al., 2016). Other research also shows that empowerment clearly affects employee engagement and that empowerment is itself a strategy for enhancing employee engagement by providing more meaningful work (Rudolph & Baltes, 2017; Tanskanen et al., 2016).

Engagement – influencing, motivating or inspiring people to want to do what needs to be done – is the focus of most theories of leadership. However, it is only one piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is leadership. Viewing leadership as only about engaging people at work is a mistake, though it is clearly a necessary and probably the most important element as the consequence of the other five core practices of leadership. Engagement is the extent to which people are motivated or inspired to willingly, even eagerly, give of their discretionary effort over and above doing what they have to do (Gill, 2011, p. 257). Jim Dethmer and colleagues allude to spirit in saying: “[Employee engagement] is all about allowing the flow of life force or energy in individuals and in an organization’ [which] ‘is directly related to their vitality, passion, focus, creativity, innovation, intuition, clarity, and vision” (Dethmer et al., 2014).

Schaufeli and colleagues (2002) found that employee engagement is a positive, fulfilling and affective-motivational state of work-related well-being that is displayed during task performance by:

• Absorption (a cognitive dimension) – maintaining high levels of concentration and involvement
• Dedication (an emotional dimension) – showing high levels of involvement, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride and challenge
• Vigour (a physical dimension) – showing high levels of energy, persistence and effort, despite setbacks and difficulties

Engagement is akin to ‘flow’: a high degree of engagement is experienced and displayed when there is undistracted, concentrated absorption in an activity which is rewarding in itself as greatly pleasurable, joyous, even rapturous (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014, pp. 239–263). There is empirical evidence for the mediating effect of meaning in work in the relationship between leadership and engagement (Ghadi et al., 2013). And meaningfulness of work is associated positively with psychological well-being (Arnold et al., 2007). One particular feature of engagement – affective commitment (emotional attachment to the organization) – is a direct predictor of employees’ psychological well-being (Rivkin et al., 2018). And a positive relationship was found in a study in a large HR services organization in Germany between leaders’ own engagement and employee engagement (and performance), with quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) as a mediator (Gutermann et al., 2017). Much evidence exists for the association between employee engagement and employee well-being (Guest, 2014). It is a salutary thought that making money for the owners of a business (its purpose) never was motivating or engaging for its employees.

Much research has focused on why employees are unengaged or disengaged at work. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2016, p. 13) says that research suggests two reasons: those in leadership and management positions do not understand what people really want from work and too ma...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Themes
• Sectors
• Key Issues
• Epistemologies/Methodologies
• About the Authors
• Index