Abstract
Spiritual leadership is an emerging holistic leadership construct that has been validated in several cultures outside of North America. However, these studies have failed to examine the underlying relationship of embedded cultural values and spiritual leadership. To address this problem, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of Confucian values to spiritual leadership within a South Korean context. Data was gathered through surveys from three firms within Korea’s financial sector. Factor analysis of Confucian values found a two-factor solution, including social order and harmony. Harmony was excluded from analysis due to poor inter-scale correlations. Social order showed a positive, significant relationship to spiritual leadership variables, suggesting Confucian values comprise a portion of the inner life of Koreans and support the emergence of spiritual leadership within a Confucian context. The results of this study increase our understanding of the importance of emic manifestations of leadership theory in generalizing western leadership theories to outside cultures.
Highlights
The universality of spiritual leadership is achieving international recognition
Simplified results of the causal analysis of the extended spiritual leadership model are shown in Figure 1, depicting path coefficients on arrow links and the proportion of each variable’s explained variance in parentheses
A key purpose of this study was to test the relationship of Confucian values to the emergence of spiritual leadership
Summary
The universality of spiritual leadership is achieving international recognition. Ten years have passed since Fry’s (2003) theory of spiritual leadership was published in the Leadership Quarterly. While Fry’s (2003) theory claims universality, as reflected through the universal nature of spiritual assumptions and attitudes, these foundation studies were all conducted in a predominately North American, individualistic cultural context This trend has changed, as of late, in which reliable studies have begun emerging in diverse cultural contexts with unique spiritual foundations and attitudes, including Turkey (Ayranci & Semercioz, 2011), Pakistan (Bodia & Ali, 2012), Iran (Javanmard, 2012), China (Chen, Yang, & Li, 2012), and South Korea (Jeon, Passmore, Lee, & Hunsaker, 2013). While these recent studies in culturally and spiritually diverse contexts have both expanded the reach of spiritual leadership and validated its universality, the studies have not investigated the potential underlying role of the cultural context in the emergence of spiritual leadership
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