Workplace Spirituality: Sustainable Work Experience from a Human Factors Perspective

Abstract

It is important to note that spiritual matter here is not about a religious, but a human centered view based on self-awareness, life purpose and community engagement. These three aspects of spirituality are the predominant perspective in the literature of organizational changes. These organizational changes are defining new paradigms for work relationships and impacting work environments. Some of these new paradigms are related to work motivation and job satisfaction, which are highly connected to organizational sustainability. Therefore, we choose to investigate workplace spirituality in order to move towards sustainability. In fact, there are already some reviews about workplace spirituality, and the most cited one organizes the topic in three dimensions: first, the inner life dimension that remains in self-centered matters such as identity and values; second, the sense of purpose dimension that refers to work significance perception; and lastly, the sense of community dimension that remains in connection and engagement. Okay, if we already have reviews about that, what is the point? In this review, we choose the predominant perspective on workplace spirituality to turn theoretical discussions into manageable human factors that are expressed by relationship needs at three levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal and institutional. With this new organization of the theme, we expect to support managers to perform actions focused on the type of relationship that is desired to be strengthened. From the review, we identify a total of twelve human factors organized by these three relationship levels, each one with four human factors. The main contribution of this study is a systematic review of workplace spirituality based on a human factor perspective.