Organizational Spirituality

Conceptual Overview

Organizational spirituality can be considered to rest within a threefold typology of spirituality. Religious spirituality is accepted as real in the major religions of the world. Its beliefs are theistic, and its practices are demonstrated in ritual and ceremony, both within the sacred space, be it church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, and in everyday activities.

Secular spirituality includes earth-centered, nature-centered, and humanistic spiritualities. Its beliefs may be pantheistic or atheistic, and its practices include social and environmental activism. Mystical spirituality can be seen as a subdiscipline within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and is present in the Eastern traditions. Its beliefs are theistic, and its practices, like religious spirituality, can take place in a dedicated sacred space or in everyday circumstances.

Currently, there is no consensus on a definition of organizational spirituality, and a number of synonyms are used in the literature: workplace spirituality, spirit at work, spirituality in the workplace. Organizational spirituality is neither an activity (the way people act spiritually around here) nor a process (the way people spiritualize around here). It can be viewed as a belief, as a quality that can be exhibited by the individuals who make up a workforce, as a feeling about reality and transcendence, or as a combination of these. In the broadest sense, organizational spirituality is spirituality exhibited in the workplace through behavior or attitude, but it is not an attribute of organizational functioning.

If one accepts the reification of an organization into an entity with its own reality, rather than considering that an organization is a collection of people engaged in purposeful activity, then it is a short step to endowing the reified organization with attributes. Organizational spirituality then shares the same grammatical meaning as aspects such as organizational culture, which concerns the culture of the organization, and organizational strategy, which concerns the strategy of the organization. But whereas culture is an activity (the way people do things around here) and strategy is a process (the way people decide things around here), spirituality is a far more abstract quality and sits uncomfortably with the other concepts. Using the synonyms for organizational spirituality—workplace spirituality, spirituality in the workplace, and spirit at work—eliminates the necessity to consider the term at the organizational level, where it cannot exist, and returns the concept to the individuals who work for the organization.

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