Workplace spirituality and employee engagement

Abstract

Interest in workplace spirituality and employee engagement has increased considerably over the last decade among practitioners and scholars. However, even though both topics focus on the importance of the spirit at work, they have emerged independent of each other with little attention to how they are related. In this paper, I describe how workplace spirituality and employee engagement are related and the implications of workplace spirituality for employee engagement. In particular, I describe the importance of workplace spirituality for meaningfulness at work and for engagement maintenance and generalization. A model of workplace spirituality and employee engagement is presented in which three dimensions of workplace spirituality (transcendence, community, and spiritual values) relate to employee engagement through four psychological conditions (meaningfulness in work, meaningfulness at work, safety, and availability). The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the model for research and practice on workplace spirituality and employee engagement.