Is the spiritual bond bound by blood? An exploratory study of spiritual leadership in family firms

Abstract

Our research is one of the first to examine spiritual leadership, which lies at the crossroads of workplace spirituality and transcendental leadership, within the context of family firms. We describe how the unique characteristics of family firms allow for and encompass spiritual leadership. First, we adapt the construct of spiritual leadership to the firm level. Then, analyzing dyadic data, we provide empirical support for the emerging theory of spiritual leadership by linking the spiritual bond between leader and follower to organizational citizenship behavior, a new dependent variable in the nomological net of spiritual leadership. We further explore the relationship in subsets of our data, finding that the relationship holds for family members but does not hold for non-family employees of the family business. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.