Spiritual Leadership: Meaning in the Sustainable Workplace

Joanna Samul

doi:10.3390/su12010267

Abstract

The topic of leadership enjoys unflagging interest among management theorists and practitioners. One of the trends that arose in the 1990s is spiritual leadership. Some authors have pointed out the importance of spiritual leadership is to create a sustainable workplace for employees. Thus, there is a need to present the achievements of academic knowledge in this topic. The aim of the paper is to synthesize research in the emerging spiritual leadership theory and its importance for the creation of a sustainable workplace. This study explores the concept of spiritual leadership and proposes a conceptual model of spiritual leadership within the context of the sustainability of the workplace. The study is based on a literature review and bibliometric analysis of 373 publications from the Scopus database, spanning the period from 1980 to 2019. The findings obtained indicate that the development of the spiritual leadership theory is relevant and applicable to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable workplace for employees.

Highlights

Interest in the topic of leadership in an organization is constantly growing, as well as the search for the conditions of successful leadership
The literature review was not limited to these publications, and included the other relevant papers and books that appeared during the search
The literature review and bibliometric analysis allow the conclusion of some findings of spiritual leadership theory

Summary

Introduction

Interest in the topic of leadership in an organization is constantly growing, as well as the search for the conditions of successful leadership. Based on this search for the conditions of successful leadership, many leadership theories have emerged: the Great Man theory with an attempt to answer the question “who a leader is”; behavioral theory with “what a leader does”; contingency theory with “where does leadership happen or occur”; and transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and other types of leadership with “what does a leader think about, mind, and do” A lot of concepts have been developed that make up these theories. An attempt to find the success of a leader is constantly undertaken

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Conclusion