Spirituality at work: construct conceptualization and measurement

Abstract

Spirituality has been a very sacred concept in India. This concept has largely been understood with religion. However, religions are often laden with rituals, dogmas and factionalism. Since human life is largely represented in action and workplaces, individual life may not be dissociated with social and work life. The word spirituality has been described variedly by different people. Do organizations really need spirituality at work? Literatures show that there are organizations, which have identified the strength and need of it and they have achieved sustainable positive performance and progress. Moreover, all religions talk of honest work and action in workplaces. Workplaces are now full of individuals who are under huge stress, frustration, disillusionment, rat race and job dissatisfaction. These have started giving bad results in terms of peace, harmony, cooperation and organizational performances. It is being felt that we start to pay respect to our age old value systems which recognize every individual and provide enough rooms for them to grow and perform for realizing vision and fulfilling its objectives by introducing spirituality at work. The study aims at certain objectives in understanding a common meaning of spirituality and conceptualizing construct for spirituality at work. Besides detailed literature review, data has been collected from samples of Government organization, specifically, East Central Railway employees. Methods adopted in data collection have been convenient sampling, simple random sampling, personal in-depth interview, preparing transcriptions, etc. The exploratory analyses largely on Grounded Theory approach provided various characteristics of spiritual and nonspiritual persons. Out of those, certain most important defining and least defining characteristics have also been ascertained. Further, various items and dimensions for spirituality have also been prepared for conceptualizing the construct for spirituality. The qualitative and qualitative analyses of data further revealed that across the religions, spirituality at work has always been a highly acclaimed and desired area and has been the essence of religion. Various demographic variables have been analysed against the items/dimensions of spirituality and results have been quite interesting which could help the organizations in ensuring in ensuring better organizational performances through sustainable development. However, there has been enough scope for future research as limitations were there with the study.