Jan 29th 2010
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Loading ...Do you believe? Spirituality in the workplace
Although most Australians profess some form of religious faith, spirituality is largely a taboo topic in the workplace. But if our personal beliefs are so important, asks David Bubna-Litic, why do we keep them separate from what happens at work?
In the 2006 Australian census, more than 70 percent of respondents reported having some form of religious belief: the majority (63.9 percent) affiliated themselves with forms of Christianity and about six percent, with non-Christian faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or Judaism. Some 18.7 percent reported having no religious affiliation, leaving the vast majority of Australians as adhering to some form of spiritual belief. Yet in most workplaces, spirituality is a no-go area.
Many academics are breaking the silence around this topic – not because we want to revive old ways of thinking but out of a desire to engage with the lived experience of the community; to find new ways of thinking about old questions. Many people report private experiences of sacredness or the sublime but rarely do we find these experiences examined in academic journals outside of religious studies areas, or applied to how people behave in the workplace.
Mainstream management thought has long dismissed any interest in spirituality, primarily because it is regarded as unscientific but also because there is a fear that religious beliefs can result in overly zealous opinions and might suffocate productive discourse. Arguably, the current form of market capitalism has premises that are incompatible with those of many religions. Modern management has incorporated a scientific worldview that dispenses with ‘magical thinking’ and religious superstition. Religion and spirituality are seen as antithetical to good management.
This ‘modern’ perspective is supported by a stream of thinkers who have depicted religion in pathological terms. Freud saw religion as a neurotic symptom; Marx saw it as ‘the opiate of the masses’ and, more recently, Richard Dawkins has written about ‘the god delusion’. Principles of rational management promote reward for merit rather than personal or religious loyalties and, as a consequence, organisations have sought to remove any vestige of religion from the workplace. The current conversation about spirituality is an attempt, however, to separate the baby from the bathwater by seeking new understandings that can be integrated with contemporary thinking.
Now secularism has become an established part of the culture of global capitalism, there is a growing sense that something is missing from corporate life. That having purged organisations of any form of spiritual or religious expression, offices seem soulless; shopping malls lack a sense of real connection to people. Store windows often point to what inspires us – but ‘shopping-mall Zen’ is only an appropriation of Zen images. Little in organisational life – whether commercial, public or not-for-profit – engages with anything other than mundane work or consumption.
Contemporary critiques present formidable challenges to the assumptions of mainstream religions, but they do little to shake interest in spiritual questions. Religious membership around the world seems hardly dented, indeed, amazon.co.uk reported that its sales of bibles went up 120 percent when The God Delusion was on the bestseller lists.
In Australia, while interest in Christianity is on the wane and the number of non-believers is rising, overall interest in religion (particularly non-Western religion) remains highly resilient. This reflects a shift to a much more dynamic and labile set of viewpoints, far more robust than the straw dogs Dawkins thinks he has collared.
These attacks fail to recognise that religion (like science) doesn’t have to be a fixed view. No matter how successfully critics expose the answers that religions provide, they will have little or no impact if they don’t touch on the core questions that draw people to religion in the first place.
Recent academic interest in spirituality attempts to move beyond black-and-white, scientific or unscientific distinctions; it seeks to open up a new dialogue in which these horizons merge.
The core questions
The core questions that draw people to religion are mostly existential: ‘What does it all mean?’, for instance, and ‘What is a good life?’ Answers given by science often fall short. Contemporary writers on spirituality are re-examining such questions in light of a mature understanding of the limits of rationality. After all, what comfort does science offer parents whose child has died tragically, or to the executive who finds at the peak of her career that she has terminal cancer? Science has very little to say about our lived experience of the world.
Advocates of a contemporary expression of spirituality argue that the personal and work spheres interpenetrate each other. They say we need to work towards a coherent integration of the instrumental/technical dimensions and the moral dimensions of social life.
In his book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, poet and consultant David Whyte says work is not just something we have to do: it is ‘a great pilgrimage of identity by which we discover larger and larger perspective on our self and the world we inhabit’.
The larger context for the current conversation is that writers and thinkers have long raised questions about the impact of corporations on quality of life. Certainly, things have improved since William Blake wrote of the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution – however, the sense of optimism about modernity that prevailed through much of the 20th century has become a jaded sense of pessimism; there is a deepening suspicion that modernity’s promise to liberate us all from suffering through technological advances appears to be an ever-receding horizon. Despite our apparent progress, we seem to be no happier than our ancestors were.
The failed promises of modernity
The present century contrasts with the last in that we now temper our commitment to technology with insights into its limits. Technological progress has created a consumer culture that brings only fleeting satisfaction at the cost of terrifying risks. The consensus of scientists is that we now face an unprecedented ecological crisis – we are outrunning the ability of the planet to sustain our collective lifestyle.
Science has not dispelled our ignorance. Its reward has been to reveal an even stranger universe, in which old assumptions unravel and even greater mysteries replace them. The result is not the promised certainty but continued insecurity – and perhaps even an increase in anxiety.
Compounding these uncertainties, the pace of change continually overturns the everyday routines that give us a sense of psychological security. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a strong sense of identity and the question surfaces: ‘Is there more to life than this?’
The emerging spirituality emphasises the wholeness of our experience. It recognises that it is unhealthy to quarantine off parts of our lives.
Opening to a new horizon of spirituality
The key message of the new perspective on spirituality is that we might find new ways of being that acknowledge existential questions in the midst of our working lives. Workplace spirituality can enable individuals to explore healthier relationships with work and each other.
If there is criticism that this concept of spirituality is ill defined, then it is better to think of it not as a (religious) dogma but as an open field of inquiry, a space inhabited by a variety of voices and perceptions.
The idea that the worlds of work and spirituality interpenetrate leads to the central ethical question: ‘What is it good to be?’ This ethos has deep implications for how we live, work and organise.
Some writers have expressed the potential for spirituality in organisations in performative terms. In A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America, Ian Mitroff and Elizabeth Denton believe organisations ‘must harness the immense spiritual energy within each person in order to produce world-class products and services’. A conviction about the worth and rightness of a cause does move people to action and excellence comes out of passionate enthusiasm, but to stop there would be to miss the point.
Corporate social responsibility ventures beyond economic profitability into the realm of how organisations should act within society and the physical environment. It rejects the disconnected denial of responsibility that was promoted by Milton Friedman: ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business … to increase its profits’. People are recognising that this stance is, in reality, an ideology.
Corporate social responsibility observes that every economic system relies on a web of human relationships and on our trust in the integrity of the other players. Corporations operate in complex environments, in which there are multiple linkages among players that affect value creation and thus, profit. This relational view recognises the complexity of the system and how symbolic dimensions touch us, often in ways of which we are hardly conscious. Profitability cannot be separated from notions of reputation and identity – and is not the only measure of value.
Managers who attempt to maintain the myths of objectivity and rational decision making fail to see that this kind of thinking is one-dimensional. Adopting a mature perspective means understanding that organisational outcomes emerge out of the dynamic interplay of complex and interdependent systems. From the social responsibility perspective, the interests of shareholders cannot be neatly divided from those of other stakeholders.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
Accepting this view means recognising that spirituality interpenetrates the worlds of the individual, society and the corporation. Each stakeholder must take responsibility for the creation of workplaces in which human interactions are largely transactional, and ask if this is where we should be spending the greater part of our lives.
Meeting the new horizon
Management thinkers must look beyond rational strategising to grapple with new frames of reference. Leaders have to address questions of interiority, identity and values. And, with the realisation that we are experiencing an ecological crisis, business needs to make choices that will lead us towards a sustainable future.
In the broadest sense, this is a spiritual question, and traditional corporate attitudes towards such questions need to be re-examined. With the globalisation of the world, we can now draw on the wisdom of many spiritual traditions – not just Western ideas. A common wisdom is to have humility in the face of the mystery of life, and to acknowledge our interconnection with everything in the universe. Technology has merely extended our shoreline of knowledge; it has not drained the ocean of things we do not understand.
Critical to many spiritual traditions is the necessity of living authentically, where this denotes honesty, mindful awareness and openness to experiencing life as it is. By engaging fully with our work lives, we may be less open to submitting to impoverished relationships and dysfunctional interactions. For management education, this suggests a new set of skills and a need to expand the focus of most programs of learning.
A spiritually inspired workplace can be extraordinarily productive. Most people can think of a restaurant that they love to visit. Even if its prices are higher or the food is not exceptional, it has something else, something that people recognise instinctively. It might be the mindful attention to detail, the loving care than goes into every aspect of food preparation, the warm greeting or the way the staff work together, but there is something about the experience that is of a higher order. It transcends market ideologies and has a selfless dimension. The work is being done because the staff love being there, have real friendships and love what they do.
Combining social responsibility and spirituality extends the horizon of corporate responsibility beyond what is good for the organisation to a wider view that goes beyond the interests of individuals. This does not fit easily within existing empirical frameworks. Frequently, managers are faced with the problem of how to reconcile their actions in the service of the organisation with a wider responsibility to society, to the environment or to their own integrity. Management education does little to equip managers to resolve such tensions. But we are living at a time when an awareness of the full scope of our spirituality, and its responsibilities, is necessary if we are to have a sustainable future.
Dr David Bubna-Litic is senior lecturer in Strategic Management at UTS Business. This article is condensed from the introduction to Spirituality and Corporate Social Responsibility (Gower, 2009), of which he is the editor.
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