ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore the pathways to developing inclusive organizations and leaders that harness workplace engagement, belonging, contribution, flourishing, and well-being. This subject is especially important given the ongoing widespread disengagement at work among current employees in the United States and around the world. The overall aim is to examine how we can harness organizational excellence through inclusiveness, as well as work with the inherent paradoxes and competing values at both the individual and the organizational level. Additionally, this chapter will also explore the construct of inclusive organizations and leadership in the context of the Indian wisdom text, the Bhagavad Gītā—“the most translated text after the Bible”—which, although by some accounts more than 5,000 years old, still inspires and guides the personal and work lives of more than a billion people in the world. It will briefly present the ethical and spiritual philosophy of the Gītā pertaining to empowering work cultures, various psychological types, and universally cherished values that foster workplace inclusiveness and belonging. The central purpose of this chapter is to explore ways in which leadership plays a key role in designing effective and inclusive organizations—organizations founded on the liberating tenet of shared individual and collective responsibility. For, only such organizations provide the felicitous space for creative work that is mind enriching, heart fulfilling, soul satisfying, and financially rewarding.
