With or Without Spirit: Implications for Scholarship and Leadership

This is the first paper for the symposium, “Faith in Management Scholarship and Practice.” In this role it lays out how a set of naturalistic and materialistic assumptions can be limiting for scholarship and practices related to management and organizations, and how the open exploration of faith from a variety of religious traditions can expand research and enhance practice. Contrasting predominant secular assumptions, an alternative spiritual perspective will be discussed that includes the implications for these assumptions: 1) Humans are both material and immaterial in nature and, thus, have inherent value beyond instrumental value; 2) Humans are influenced, but not wholly constrained, by their material nature and, thus, are capable of radical change; 3) Humans have the capability to transcend self-interest and, thus, can choose to serve others’ interests. Examples from leadership research are discussed as exemplars of how contrasting secular and spiritual assumptions have been and can be worked out in ...