ABSTRACT
Increased focus on spirituality issues over the past few decades has extended into the area of organizational science, to the degree that it has been asserted as a distinct discipline by researchers and practitioners. The most commonly accepted reason for this is that as individuals experience social anomie as a function of our increasingly mobile society, they are looking to their work environments to fulfill needs for belonging, social interaction, and feelings of significance (Jurkiewicz and Grossman 2012). This, combined with a trend toward seeking spiritual solutions to balance rapid business and social changes (Cash et al. 2000), enhanced by an overall shift toward socially responsible values, has increased attention toward spiritual issues in the workplace. Although the growth of research in this area has been rapid, there is much yet to be learned about the variables that impact its integration into in the workplace and whether any benefits observed can be sustained over time. Further, the definition of workplace spirituality has taken a number of permutations over time (Dent et al. 2005), making it a challenge to measure the same things in the same way (Davis et al. 2015; Kim et al. 2016). The definition given the greatest credence and used in the majority of studies on the topic is the one adopted here: workplace spirituality refers to the “aspects of the workplace, either in the individual, the group, or the organization, that promote individual feelings of satisfaction through transcendence” (Giacalone and Jurkiewicz 2010).
