Leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness: Skills, factors affecting, and their effects on performance (a qualitative study by grounded theory)

Abstract

Spiritual intelligence has received increasing quantitative research interest, while there is still no attention regarding to investigate spiritual intelligence with applying qualitative methods, especially grounded theory design. This study aimed to detect the skills, affecting factors, and the effects of spiritual intelligence and religiousness on performance. The qualitative analysis of the data collected through the in‐depth interview of the participants after encoding and classification, and the continuous comparison of the data by encoding and data by axes, resulted in these data can be coded in three axes: leader's spiritual intelligence skills, factors that affect leader's spiritual intelligence, and the effects of leader's spiritual intelligence on performance. The results revealed that there are five skills of leader's spiritual intelligence: work‐life balance skill, consists of (5) sub‐skills, leadership transcendence skill includes (6) sub‐skills, leadership meaning and purpose production skill includes (4) sub‐skills, leadership mindfulness skill consists of (9) sub‐skills, and the fifth skill is leadership virtue behavior includes (8) sub‐skills. And also, the results indicated that there are many factors that impact the leader's spiritual intelligence, were classified into three objects: personal (three factors), social and family (two factors), and work factors (4 factors). All participants were agreed unanimously that the leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness are determined and affect the performance of the leader and his subordinates, these were classified into two objects: The first object is a leader's work‐performance, consisting of (16) indicators, and the second object is a workers performance includes (12) indicators. In light of these results, the study recommended the necessity of developing leaders' awareness of the importance of passion of spiritual intelligence skill and their impacts on performance. Thus, these findings shed new light on the importance of developing leaders' spiritual intelligence skills to resolve leadership problems, and increasing productivity, creativity, and well‐being among leaders and workers in Arab World.