Hidden key to leadership? It may be spirituality

In 2005, a trio of management scholars embarked on a groundbreaking study, exploring a subject that business schools had traditionally shunned. Eric Dent, Eileen Higgins, and Deborah Wharff scoured 87 academic papers on spirituality in the workplace, not to preach but to construct a comprehensive dataset. Their findings were nothing short of astonishing: a clear majority of the papers that took a definitive stance on performance found evidence linking spirituality to enhanced results.

This revelation was a stark contrast to the prevailing trend of the time. Business schools had long steered clear of spirituality, focusing instead on metrics like revenue, employee retention, and quarterly earnings. Spirituality, with its intangible nature, had struggled to find its place in the corporate world. Surveys and interviews, even when employed, rarely yielded clear results, relegating spirituality to the sidelines of leadership theory.

For decades, spirituality had been seen as the awkward family member of leadership research, mentioned during commencement speeches but never taken seriously in academic circles. The 2005 review, however, challenged this narrative by categorizing the scholarship into eight distinct areas, examining how spirituality was defined, its connection to religion, and whether it could be taught, measured, or linked to performance outcomes.

This study, therefore, not only overturned the long-standing prejudice against spirituality in leadership but also opened up new avenues for future research in the field.