The Language of Virtues: Toward an Inclusive Approach for Integrating Spirituality in Management Education

Abstract

There is an increasing recognition that spirituality is an important variable in organizational life, and in the study and practice of management. As a result, a growing number of management educators are incorporating discussions of spirituality in the workplace into their classrooms. Because of the newness of this field and the lack of experience with teaching about this topic, it is important to pay attention to issues of language when speaking about spirituality in the workplace. The first key issue that management educators will face is what language to use that will be effective and inclusive. In this paper we will address the issue of a working definition of spirituality for the academic or training classroom and how the management educator can create a bridge from the personal to public language for the group learning process. We shall introduce the concept of virtues (transcendent values such as compassion, courage and integrity) as an inclusive language that can integrate the private languages of individual spiritual traditions into expressions of positive organizational practices. This includes a simple model for extracting a public language and learning exercises we have found useful. In addition, the implications of inclusive language will be considered in relation to the need for an expanded learning paradigm.