Book Description

1.1 An introduction to Workplace Spirituality Spirituality in the workplace has been receiving increasing attention in literature since the 1990’s. Several popular books on spirituality and leadership (Conger, 1994; Bolman & Deal, 1995; Crossman, 2015), spirituality and ethics (Ayoun, Rowe & Yassine, 2015) spirituality and entrepreneurship (Chappell, 1994; Cohen & Greenfield, 1997), spirituality and service (Gatling, 2015) have also been published. In 1999 the Academy of Management established a special interest group ‘Management, Spirituality and Religion’ which subsequently developed a large membership. Several academic journals, such as the Journal of Adult Development (2002), Journal of Organizational Change Management (2003), Journal of Management Inquiry (2005), and The Leadership Quarterly (2005), have dedicated special issues to the theme of spirituality. The Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion was created in 2004, specifically tailored to publishing scholarly work in the area of workplace spirituality, an emerging area in organization and management studies. April 2014, Barcelona, saw a World Congress on Spirituality and Creativity in Management and several organizations are offering corporate workshops, seminars, and culture transformation programs aimed at holistically harnessing both the spirit and the body of employees (ET, 2011; The Telegraph, 2015).Globally, companies are embracing the endeavor to gain competitive advantage through what could be understood as the appropriation of workplace spirituality (Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009). By addressing employees as complete humans, i.e. the recognition of their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs (Dehler &Welsh 2003) organizations can open themselves to transformation. Fry (2003) stated that if organizations are to improve their effectiveness, then, spiritual leadership must be understood for its capability to increase the intrinsic motivation of men by recognizing and incorporating the three elements of humans: body, mind, and spirit. Fry and colleagues, moreover, claim to have established empirically that practitioners of spirituality at the workplace will experience greater psychological and physical well-being (Fry, 2003).