Success and Spirituality in the New Business Paradigm

Abstract

The article discusses a study we conducted on the concept of success with mid- and senior-level executives in a federal government agency. Contrary to our expectation that the study’s participants define success in materialistic—money, positional power, and status symbols—terms, they used terms such as being connected, balance, and wholeness to define and describe success. Indeed, the participants linked the concept of success to spirituality and stated that to be successful one needs to embrace spirituality as well. The article defines spirituality, discusses the study, its findings and implications, and suggests that spirituality and the notion of success are associated. In addition, it proposes a conceptual model of success that contains four components of both success and spirituality.