Workplace spirituality or spirituality in the workplace is a movement that began in the early 1920s. It emerged as a grassroots movement with individuals seeking to live their faith and/or spiritual values in the workplace. Spiritual or spirit-centered leadership is a topic of inquiry frequently associated with the workplace spirituality movement (Benefiel, 2005; Biberman, 2000; Fry, 2005; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003; Jue, 2006).
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History
The movement began primarily as U.S. centric but has become much more international in recent years. Key organizations include:
- International Center for Spirit at Work (ICSW)
- European Baha'i Business Forum (EBBF)
- World Business Academy (WBA)
- Spiritual Business Network (SBN)
- Foundation for Workplace Spirituality
Key factors that have led to this trend include:
- Mergers and acquisitions destroyed the psychological contract that workers had a job for life. This led some people to search for more of a sense of inner security rather than looking for external security from a corporation.
- Baby Boomers hitting middle age resulting in a large demographic part of the population asking meaningful questions about life and purpose.
- The millennium created an opportunity for people all over the world to reflect on where the human race has come from, where it is headed in the future, and what role business plays in the future of the human race.
In the late 1990s, the Academy of Management formed a special interest group called the Management, Spirituality and Religion Interest Group. This is a professional association of management professors from all over the world who are teaching and doing research on spirituality and religion in the workplace.
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Examples
The International Center for Spirit at Work offers examples of workplace spirituality including:
- "Vertical" spirituality, transcending the day-to-day and developing connectedness to a god or spirit or the wider universe. This might include meditation rooms, accommodation of personal prayer schedules, moments of silence before meetings, retreats or time off for spiritual development, and group prayer or reflection.
- "Horizontal" spirituality, which involves community service, customer service, environmentalism, compassion, and a strong sense of ethics or values that are reflected in products and services.
Values
Spirituality is shown in a workplace when the following activities are included:
- Bereavement programs.
- Wellness information displayed and distributed.
- Employee Assistance Programs.
- Programs that integrate work/family.
- Management systems that encourage personal and spiritual transformation.
- Servant leadership - the desire to serve others first in preference to self.
- Stewardship - leadership practices that support growth and well-being of others.
- Diversity programs that create inclusive cultures.
- Integration of core values and core business decisions and practices.
- Leadership practices that support the growth and development of all employees.
Leading from within
Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility--and a source of profound hope for change. It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of us all.
A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good. (Palmer, p 78)
Influence from Indian philosophy
Pragya M. Kumar and his co-authors have analyzed of the influence of Indian philosophy on the teaching of management. Writing in 2010, they state that about 10% of the professors at top US business schools are of Indian descent, noting the vision of C. K. Prahalad, in which corporations "simultaneously create value and social justice." The authors cite an article characterizing the "spirituality in the workplace movement" as having become a "mini-industry." With regards to the Indian component of this industry, they state "A large number of Vedant scholars are on a whistle stop tour of the U.S. counseling executives on the central message of Bhagawat Gita to put purpose before self."
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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