Spiritual Leadership: Theory, Practice and Personal Journeys

Attempts have been made to theorize workplace spirituality in ways that make the concepts amenable to measurement and hypothetico-deductive modelling. One of the most influential approaches to have emerged is Spiritual Leadership Theory (SLT) (Fry, 2003): an approach that brings together individual spirituality and the creation of an innovative, motivated learning organization, with impact on the ‘triple bottom line’. Its critics, however, claim that it introduces attenuated definitions of spirituality and proceeds to operationalize them (Nehemya et al, 2009; Case and Gosling, 2010) in empiricist terms to produce proxy measures of spiritual leadership and corporate spirituality.

Speakers at this seminar start from the position that spirituality of some sort is important to individual and collective experiences of work, as well as influencing how many leaders approach the challenges and responsibilities of their roles. But is this necessarily and causally related to specific, definable and measurable outcomes? Is the search for such a relationship relevant to a sincere spirituality, for which mundane outcomes and business results might be unimportant?

These questions require careful definition, and also rigorous methodological critique. The seminar will be of particular interest to those who want to clarify the relationship between spiritual experience and worldly success (and failure); and for researchers in this field.

Speakers include business academics and leaders; the day will include opportunities for discussion and cross-sector networking.

• In order to book we are asking people to use a form on the website. Places are limited and are on a first come first serve basis.
• Seminar web page