BRIGHT SIDE OF WORKPLACE SPIRITUALITY- A LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this article is to review the empirical research on workplace spirituality. Evidently a growing body of knowledge concerning spirituality at work is present in the literature. The article documents the workplace spirituality empirical research including defining and measuring workplace spirituality, impact of workplace spirituality on ethical values, impact on performance and employee work attitudes. A large part of the empirical studies exhibit positive effect of WS for the organizations. It is argued that there is need to better define WS constructs in the perspective of organizational behavior, religion and organizational development, which in turn will eventually decide if the movement is a unique body of knowledge or simply a lean-to already existing disciplines. Finally the article suggests how the modern organizations can use WS to enhance performance and exhibit ethical behavior. KeywordsWorkplace spirituality, ethics, performance, attitude. INTRODUCTION In this era of Globalization and competition the organizations have realized that if they want their employees to be productive they need to manage their potential by offering them meaning in what they do. There is a paradigm shift happening from monetary and physical needs to psychological needs of job satisfaction in the business world of 21st century. Today’s knowledge professional are looking for meaning not only in their personal life but in their professional life too. This profound transformation is backed by several studies which highlight the relationship between spirituality at workplace and organizational outcomes. There has been an exponential increase in the number of management books printed on spirituality over the past 20 years with an equivalent growth in conference proceedings and symposia talk on work place spirituality across continents. The study of spirituality is still in its infancy and there is lot of scope for empirical work.Organizational behaviour literature has examined the emotional and cognitive side of organizational life, there has been little work done to explore the spiritual side of organizational life. Few decades back organizations were unwilling to discuss spirituality at workplace owing to its religious and communal connotation. During the initial phase, researchers attempted to define and identify the various dimensions of the concept of spirituality at the workplace. At the same time there were attempts being made to differentiate between religion and spirituality. There are two problems most of the researchers have faced in this area. First difficulty is defining spirituality, which itself is a challenge (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003). Owing to its subjective nature different researchers have given different definitions. Any single definition of this complex construct is unlikely to satisfy everyone. (Karakas, 2010) suggests that the “fuzziness, ambiguity, and the complexity of the construct makes spirituality a difficult research topic to investigate. Second is the difference between spirituality and religion. People often confuse religion and spirituality, thinking that they are the same thing. In truth, the two are quite different. However one cannot isolate spirituality from religion. Most if not all religious individuals are spiritual (McGhee and Grant, 2008) Spirituality does not depend on religion. In the absence of spirituality, the physically visible world would not sustain for long, whereas in the absence of religion, society could survive on its own. DEFINING AND MEASURING WORKPLACE SPIRITUALITY Empirical work on workplace spirituality holds its origin in the 1990s. By far regarded as the first large-scale empirical study on WSP, Mitroff and Denton (1999) explored how senior managers and executives view spirituality, religion, and values through face to face interviews and questionnaire. They found that most organizations suffer from spiritual impoverishment, thus reported a yearning for more spiritual openness in workplaces among the executives they interviewed. Their work focussed on the “emergent” definitions of religion and spirituality of managers and executives. They abstained from defining religion and spirituality but instead allowed it to emerge from the respondents. The response from the participants (60%) stated religion primarily as a dogmatic and institutional phenomenon, whereas spirituality was viewed as an individual phenomenon. One need not be religious to be spiritual. Respondents felt spirituality is essential for organization but they had fears attached to it, probably because of the lack of models to foster it. (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000) advanced Mitroff and Denton’s (1999) work. They defined WS as “the recognition of an inner life is nourished by meaningful work which takes place in the context of community” and developed a scale to measure it. The sample was drawn from healthcare sector with significant portion being females.Measurement was done at three levels: individual, work unit and organizational. The instrument measured three dimensions significant to spirituality in the workplace: inner life, meaningful work, and a sense of connection and community. While working on better conceptualizing spirituality (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz , 2003) edited the Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance, the major collection of essays on the subject gathered till that time , none of which report empirical work, emphasizing on the necessity of linking workplace spirituality to organizational performance, integrating © 2018 JETIR September 2018, Volume 5, Issue 9 www.jetir. org (ISSN-2349-5162) JETIRA006340 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir. org 119 psychology, spirituality, and organizational science. They defined Workplace spirituality as “a framework of organizational values evidenced in the culture that promote employees’ experience of transcendence through the work process, facilitating their sense of being connected to others in a way that provides feelings of completeness and joy” . They called various definitions of spirituality elusive in nature and said that there are number of measures that evaluate spirituality at individual level, the call is for measuring it at workplace. Seven years later, a second edition of the handbook was published by (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz , 2010). In second edition there was increased sophistication in organizational studies. However, it also reinforced the fundamental need for a scientific and empirical approach to workplace spirituality. Conceptual development is important, but at the same time the study of workplace spirituality also needed to demonstrate outcomes in order to be seen as a legitimate discipline for both scholars and practitioners. Devoid of evidence, this budding paradigm could be at risk of being looked upon as a theoretical and unrealistic pursuit. There could be various approaches to facilitate WS (Pawar , 2008) proposed two approaches to workplace spirituality facilitation. According to him the first approach is an organization-focused approach which starts with organizational spiritual values and emphasizes on organizational processes (HRM practices) to facilitate the transmission of these values to facilitate positive employee attitudes and behaviour. The second approach is individual focused approach which seeks to induce higher values through a program for transformation or spiritual development of individual employees (ex: meditation program) which will lead to richness of work life experiences and improved intrapersonal processes. Conceptualizing spirituality and development of Instruments to measure spirituality was gaining momentum (Petchsawanga and Duchon , 2009) came up with development of new scale. After doing extensive literature review they initially proposed that Workplace spirituality consists of five components, but after confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) applied to data collected from employees of a large Thai company it was concluded that four-factor model: compassion, meaningful work, mindfulness and transcendence defines WS, Connection got eliminated.Further (Karakas, 2009) after doing in-depth literature review explored how spirituality supports organizational performance. Provided certain recommendations and suggestions on how spirituality can be inculcated. (Krishna Kumar and Neck ,2002) gave three viewpoints of spirituality at work which included -the intrinsicorigin view, the religious view and the existentialist perspective, and recommended the potential benefits and outcomes for those organizations that encourage it They held that the intrinsic-origin view of spirituality is that which argues that spirituality is a concept or a principle that has its origin from the inside of an individual and it is something which is beyond the rules of religion. Spirituality implies an inner search for meaning or fulfilment that may be undertaken by anyone regardless of religion. After 11 years (Krishnakumar and Neck , 2016) provided a retrospective update and expansion of the Krishnakumar and Neck (2002) “what, why, and how” framework and “spiritual freedom” model. They concluded stating that a number of the potential benefits/outcomes of workplace spirituality (e.g. intuition and creativity, honesty and trust) have not been adequately investigated through empirical research. After Krishnakumar and Neck’s (2002) categorization of definitions within the intrinsic-origin and existentialist perspectives, it was noted that there was the increasing number of definitions of spirituality but there was lack of a single widely accepted definition. However more recently many scholars (e.g. Karakas 2010; Chawla and Guda 2013;Gupta, Kumar, and Singh 2014) have noted that it is an extremely personal construct highlighting on inner life, meaningful work, and a sense of connection and community-three dimensions which were originally conceptualized by