The second half of the journey: Spiritual leadership for organizational transformation

Benefiel, Margaret

doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.07.005

Cited by 182 publications

(163 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

152

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Yet, some authors criticize Fry's model as well as other models of spirituality and leadership for not providing a sufficient understanding of what constitutes spirituality and the ways in which it ties to leadership. For example, Benefiel (2005) criticized the work on spirituality and leadership, stating that it "inadvertently draws upon outdated, discredited, or shallow approaches to spirituality; they reinvent the wheel; they dip into credible theories of spirituality but then don't fully develop them or resolve the conflicts among them. While these theories are comprehensive and creative in the context of leadership studies, a more robust, up-to-date, and sophisticated understanding of spirituality is needed if theories of spiritual leadership are to stand up under scrutiny and be taken seriously in the wider academy" (p. 727).…”

Section: Future Focus Requiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions

Avolio

Walumbwa

Weber

2009

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

2,044

1,612

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This review examines recent theoretical and empirical developments in the leadership literature, beginning with topics that are currently receiving attention in terms of research, theory, and practice. We begin by examining authentic leadership and its development, followed by work that takes a cognitive science approach. We then examine new-genre leadership theories, complexity leadership, and leadership that is shared, collective, or distributed. We examine the role of relationships through our review of leader member exchange and the emerging work on followership. Finally, we examine work that has been done on substitutes for leadership, servant leadership, spirituality and leadership, cross-cultural leadership, and e-leadership. This structure has the benefit of creating a future focus as well as providing an interesting way to examine the development of the field. Each section ends with an identification of issues to be addressed in the future, in addition to the overall integration of the literature we provide at the end of the article.

show abstract

Section: Future Focus Requiredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions

Avolio

Walumbwa

Weber

2009

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

2,044

1,612

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…CR may allow for both positivist and interpretivist approaches to be both valuable and useful in understanding SAW. Certainly, some new approach is required if, as Benefiel (2005) …”

Section: Downloaded By Auckland University Of Technology At 14:36 03 mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, quantitative and qualitative methods 2 are seen as opposing approaches in SAW research (Benefiel, 2005). However, Danermark et al (1997) contend that from a critical realist perspective both approaches are "meaningful -but in different ways -in the search for generative mechanisms, as well as in investigations of how mechanisms manifest themselves in various contexts" (p. 163).…”

Section: The Extensive Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

Applying critical realism in spirituality at work research

McGhee

Grant

2017

MRR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. Design/methodology/approach: CR is a philosophical meta-theory that allows the stratification of spirituality into different levels of reality, advocates for research methods matching the ontology of the level investigated, and provides complementary methods of exploring this phenomenon's causal power in social contexts. The authors present a study where CR was used to explain how and why SAW influences ethics in organizational contexts. Findings:The results demonstrate that CR provides a useful approach to bridging the positivist-interpretivist difference in SAW research. Moreover, a CR approach helped explain the underlying conditions and causal mechanisms that power SAW to influence ethical decision-making and behavior in the workplace. Originality/value: While CR has been applied in management literature, negligible SAW material has utilized this approach. That which does exist is either conceptual or does not explicitly discuss their methods of data analysis or describe how CR concepts resulted in their findings. This paper addresses that lacuna. CR also provides value, as an alternative approach to SAW research, in that it allows the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods as complementary, not confrontational, approaches to the study of SAW while providing a more integrated and deeper view of SAW and its effects. Opposing this view are those that argue for interpretivist approaches (Lips-Wiersma, 2003, Neal et al., 1999. For instance, Fornaciari and Dean (2001) argue that scientific knowledge is a partial truth, a truth that ignores inner meaning. They "challenge the dominance of the positivist paradigm in spirituality in organizations research, pointing out the absurdity of trying to factor analyse God" (p. 35).Unfortunately, SAW is not easy to classify and can be problematic to measure. How we express spirituality tends to be value-laden and inherently personal. Unfortunately, human beings are complex non-rational and emotional creatures who tend to defy the neat, behaviourist definitions offered by the positivist model. As Lips-Wiersma (2003) argues, not only is one's expression of spirituality intensely unique to each individual, any inquiry into its nature or effe...

show abstract

“…However, unless we gain more understanding of such beliefs at the level of inner meaning (instead of actual behaviour) and present them in their proper contexts, these debates seem fruitless. Another challenge is found in moving into a more qualitative, nonpositivist way of knowing, since spirituality denotes meanings that go beyond materialistic understandings of values (Forniciari and Dean 2001;Dean, Forniciari and McGee 2003;Benefiel 2005).…”

Section: Spiritual Leadershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spiritual Power. Ethnic Chinese Managers and the Rise of Charismatic Christianity

Koning

Dahles

2009

cjas

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores the conversion of ethnic Chinese managers in Indonesia and Malaysia to charismatic Christianity, a movement characterized by experiential spirituality, healing, and prophesying. The spiritual turn among ethnic Chinese managers is positioned against literature on spirituality in organizations and the acclaimed need for managers and business leaders to bring spirituality to work in order to enhance efficiency and employee well-being under the present Zeitgeist of growing global competition and organizational change. An important missing link, however, in this rather instrumentalist literature is a contextualized approach to the inner meanings of religion-based spirituality in the lives of the managers involved. By analyzing the experiences as narrated by converted managers in Indonesia and Malaysia against the background of their cultural, political, social and economic context-in this case the ethno-religious power relations at national levels-this article takes the analysis beyond the goal-oriented leadership literature. Additionally, it applies a comparative approach to show that the spiritual turn may have divergent meanings to actors in different contexts. The outcomes of the research illustrate that religion-based spirituality among ethnic Chinese managers in Indonesia and Malaysia is empowering at the managerial level but also, although differently constituted, at the ethnic level.

show abstract

The second half of the journey: Spiritual leadership for organizational transformation

Cited by 182 publications

References 14 publications

Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions

Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions

Applying critical realism in spirituality at work research

Spiritual Power. Ethnic Chinese Managers and the Rise of Charismatic Christianity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About