A Eupsychian Perspective of Spiritual Leadership
-
Upload
miguel-oliveira -
Category
Documents
-
view
189 -
download
0
description
Transcript of A Eupsychian Perspective of Spiritual Leadership
A EUPSYCHIAN PERSPECTIVE OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
Arménio Rego Miguel Pina e CunhaUniversidade Nova de LisboaUniversidade de Aveiro
Portugal
Miguel OliveiraUniversidade do Minho
Eupsychian Management
“Eupshychian” was coined by A Maslow, in Eupshychian Management (1965)
It comes from the combination of eu, meaning good (i.e., euphoria) and psyche, meaning mind or soul.
Eupshychian means “having a good mind/soul”, “toward a good mind/soul” or “the well-being of psyche” .
Eupshychia is the society or organization where human beings naturally strive to become “self-actualizing”.
Eupsychian Management
Maslow was mainly excited by the possibility that
employment could provide people with the opportunity
to satisfy their higher order needs for self-esteem and
self-actualization
Organizations and HR systems should be designed according to 36 assumptions that enlightened managers would adopt
Assume (e.g.,)...•Everyone is to be trusted.
•Everyone can enjoy good teamwork, good group harmony, good belongingness, and group love.
•Everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, disrespected
•Everyone prefers or perhaps even needs to love his boss (rather than to hate him)…
•All human beings, not only eupsychian ones, prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.
•The preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in contrast to being anonymous or interchangeable).
•A tendency to identify with more and more of the world, moving toward the ultimate of mysticism, a fusion with the world, or peak experience, cosmic consciousness, etc.
•We shall have to work out the assumption of the metamotives and the metapathologies, of the yearning for the “B-values”, i.e., truth, beauty, justice, perfection, and so on.
Virtuous circles
Managers’ self-actualization (i.e., enlightened managers) can
produce virtuous circles in organizations, i.e., self-
actualization in other people, since they can satisfy lower
order needs (i.e., physical, safety and social ones).
This is good for improving employees’ health and well-being, and for the organization’s performance as well.
This, in turn, may lead people to internalize B values (e.g.,
wholeness, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, humor,
completion, playfulness).
“Stimuli” for our research
Spirituality is a recent vigorous stream of literature, although
empirical research is still scarce.
Few studies relate leadership behaviors with WS.
Several notions offered in definitions of spirituality (Hicks,
2002) evoke the notion of eupshychian management
(e.g., self-actualization, self-fulfillment, wholeness, harmony,
balance, meaning, vitality, energy, virtue, wisdom, truth,
freedom and interconnectedness).
Research questions
1. What leaders’ behaviors (dis)respect employees’ perceptions of workplace spirituality?
2. How do employees declare to react to these behaviors?
3. Do employees incorporate religion in their sense of workplace spirituality?
4. What kind and proportion of positive and negative leaders’ behaviors do employees report when invited to narrate events about leaders’ behaviors and their impacts on workplace spirituality?
Method
Critical incident technique.
A convenience sample of 105 employees from 53 organizations
Mean age: 32.3 years
Mean contact time between employees & leaders: 4.1 years
68.6% - female
3% - basic education28% - secondary education69% - university education
Three “moments”
1. Individuals were informed that WS refers to workplace opportunities to perform meaningful work in the context of a community with a sense of joy and respect for inner-life.
2. They were asked to report two events in which their leaders respected or disrespected WS.
3. After describing each incident, they were asked to report how they reacted to the leader’s behavior.
175 useful critical incidents
120 referring to disrespectful behaviors of workplace spirituality (“anti-eupshychian” events)
55 to respectful behaviors (“eupshychian” events)
Leadership behaviors:the two researchers reached the same classification in
75% of incidents
Employees’ reactions:Coefficient of agreement - 80%.
For resolving the divergences: several iterations through e-mail interactions and face-to-face meetings
Findings
Leadership behaviors The leader:
Number of times the behavior
was mentioned
Number of times the employee reaction was mentioned
Psychologi-cal well being
Commit-ment and sense of calling
Positive behaviors
and attitudes toward
supervisor
Sense of self-worth
(being appreciated)
Promotes self-determination and employee personal development.
25 14 15 1 5
Respects personal and inner life of employees.
10 5 3 3 2
Is kind, compassionate, loyal and respectful.
8 4 1 3 1
Promotes positive interpersonal relationships and the sense of team community.
7 1 3 3 0
Is courageous and open-minded. 5 5 1 2 0
Effects of eupsychian leadership behaviors
Effects of anti-eupsychian leadersh. behaviors Leadership behaviorsThe leader:
Number of times
Number of times the employee reaction was mentioned
Voice, complai-ning and upward appeal
Negative emotions
and feelings
Neglect, passivity
and silence (passive
response)
Retaliation/ disobedi-
ence (active
response)
Decrea-sing role
and extra-role
perfor-mance
Exit Effects on the team
Relation-ship with
and feelings toward
the super-visor
Power abuses. 62 26 21 9 8 10 2 5 2
Is ruthless/cruel/unkind
19 9 8 3 3 2 2 0 0
Disrespects personal and inner life of employees
17 4 4 7 3 0 2 1 1
Is lazy and coward 13 7 2 2 2 1 0 0 2
Is dishonest and false 9 4 3 1 3 0 1 0 1
Discriminates employees
8 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1
Instigates bad interp. Relationships
5 2 1 1 1 0 1 1 0
Discussion and
conclusions
The realism of the utopian Eupsychia
• As the POS and WS literatures have shown, Maslow’s quest for eupsychian organizations appears to be more realistic that some criticisms regarding their allegedly utopian aims would suggest (Payne, 2000).
•Eisler & Montouori (2003) epitomized this assumption arguing that there is mounting evidence that a more humane workplace is more productive, flexible and creative.
Prevalence of anti-eupsychian events
Real proportion of eupsychian and anti-eupsychian events in organizations?
Do some kind of “negative deviance” induces people to recall and be more sensitive to the negative side of organizational functioning?
A paradoxical possibility of a “positive deviance? (assuming that people expect to be well treated, negative events become more salient in their minds).
Limitations and future studies
• Moderating variables were not considered.
• Critical incident technique has some drawbacks and limitations.
• Sequence of events were not considered.
Final comments
Ghoshal & Moran’s (2005) good theory of management, the interest for Indian philosophies (Engardio, 2006), and the positive scholarship movement (Cameron et al., 2004), are recent examples of the “Eupsychian turn”.
In our research, we suggested that enlightened managers, as Maslow called them, may contribute toward creating eupsychian islands, and presented some practices that distinguish these eupsychian leaders from their “realist” counterparts.
Thank you so much