7 Organizational Behavior and Workplace Spirituality

Organizational Behavior and Workplace SpiritualityOrganizational behavior (OB) has been defined as a field of research on human behavior focused on understanding, explaining, and improving attitudes within organizational and workplace contexts (Neck et al., 2020).OB is both interdisciplinary in its focus (e.g., psychology, sociology, etc.) and multi-level (i.e., individual, group, and organization).Interestingly, OB scholars often examine the interface between these various levels, drawing on theories created both by OB scholars and from scholars in underlying disciplines.For instance, it is not uncommon for OB scholars to study individual perceptions of the organizational environment within the workplace, facilitating research on a wide range of organizational issues and outcomes.Spirituality in the workplace, both at a micro and macro level, should be of great interest to OB scholars because of its potential to serve as an effective framework for understanding and shaping workplace attitudes and behaviors in positive ways.Although there is growing interest in spirituality in the workplace among OB scholars (Geigle, 2012;Gotsis & Kortezi, 2008;Houghton et al., 2016;Krishnakumar & Neck, 2002), much of the work to date has been conceptual in nature and is therefore somewhat lacking in empirical support.This relative lack of empirical evidence affords OB researchers with an excellent opportunity to explore the relationships between workplace spirituality and a host of OB outcomes.Indeed, given their interests in examining individual perceptions within organizational contexts, OB scholars are especially well-positioned to study spirituality in organizations to help fill this gap in the literature.This chapter examines workplace spirituality as it has been studied by OB scholars.Therefore, a particular focus of this chapter is on outcomes frequently studied in the OB literature.We begin by summarizing some of the more important findings in the OB literature regarding how spirituality functions in the workplace and how it relates to various outcomes.This first part of the chapter focuses on OB areas where a substantial amount of research has been done and is followed by a section outlining less explored areas that may provide interesting avenues for future research.After reviewing a sampling of studies from each of these areas, we continue by discussing some of the methods used to study workplace spirituality in OB.Finally, the chapter probes some of the shortcomings in the extant literature before suggesting possible future directions for OB researchers interested in understanding how spiritualty can affect employees at both the individual and organizational levels.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.