Searching for Spiritual Intuition in Management

Abstract

This paper is a search for spiritual intuition in the management literature. The amount of published work on spiritual intuition is small compared with other types of intuition (creative, expert, moral and social). This literature review and conceptual paper: (a) searched for and reviewed the research on spiritual intuition in management; (b) alighted on the work of Frances Vaughan as the primary exponent of spiritual intuition; (c) traced steps backwards from Vaughan into transpersonal psychology; (d) found evidence for spiritual intuition in the work of two of the most prominent psychologists of the 20th century, James and Maslow; (e) identified links between spiritual intuition and other types of intelligences and capabilities. A contribution of this paper is that it adds a fifth type of intuition to the four types that have already been identified and shows how this is relevant for management. The types of intuition shown to be related, but they draw on different source disciplines and have different implications for management. A framework is presented which unifies five primary types of intuition. Spiritual intuition is proposed as being at the core of this framework for ‘intuitive intelligence’.