Workplace spirituality


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.

History

The movement began primarily as U.S. centric but has become much more international in recent years. Key organizations include:
Key factors that have led to this trend include:
  1. 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.
  2. Baby Boomers hitting middle age resulting in a large demographic part of the population asking meaningful questions about life and purpose.
  3. 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.

Examples

The International Center for Spirit at Work offers examples of workplace spirituality including:
Spirituality is shown in a workplace when the following activities are included:

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.