Pakistan Journal of Science (Vol. 67 No.1March, 2015)
IMPACT OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP ON WORKPLACE SPIRITUALITY: MODERATING ROLE OF INVOLVEMENT CULTURE K. E. Khan,*S. E. Khan,and **A. G.Chaudhry, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council Islamabad Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bahria University Islamabad ** Department of Anthropology, PMAS Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi Corresponding Author: *
[email protected] *
ABSTRACT: The study aimed at examining the impact of servant leadership on workplace spirituality. Throughout history among various leadership models, servant leadership is a peculiar model of leadership where leader is servant first. Concept of servant leadership has roots in religious teachings, thus its connection and impact on workplace spirituality was assessed. In this study three questionnaires measured servant leadership, workplace spirituality and organizational culture. Results of the study showed that servant leadership had positive and significant relationship with workplace spirituality, with organizational culture as moderator variable that was also positively related to workplace spirituality. Keywords: Servant leadership, Leadership models, Workplace spirituality, Involvement culture, Religious teachings (Received
16-08-14
Accepted 28-02-15) associated with employee motivation and making workplace more meaningful (Ramlaal, 2004). Workplaces are failing (GHCT, 2014) to give meaningful environment to employees, and these result in higher employee turnover intention and leave a negative impact on organizational performance. Organizational environments in Pakistan are also challenged with leadership styles (Khan, 2010), as leadership style can give better results with minimum payoff. With the fall of capitalism and decline in secularism, organizational work places can benefit from spirituality, making it important and productive for the organizations and at large the society. This study is proposed to explore the impact of servant leadership on workplace spirituality with moderating role of organizational culture. This issue is well suited to Pakistan, because it has a very rich culture and heritage to support spirituality. At the organizational level many studies have not been carried out in the field of servant leadership. For this study we used frame work proposed by Herman and systematically used servant leadership as independent variable and workplace spirituality as a dependent variable and in addition, organizational culture served as a moderator variable. (Herman, 2008) Key objective of the research is to study the impact and magnitude of servant leadership on workplace spirituality, to investigate key factors of servant leadership that influences the workplace spirituality and to observe the role of organizational culture as a moderator variable in impacting servant leadership on workplace spirituality.
INTRODUCTION Many work places are losing their workers spirituality, because technology overpowers traditional workplaces ,for stakeholders to maximize their revenues with minimum leverage. Stable companies do not face challenges from organizational competition, however internal disarray can be challenging. Some peoplecentered organizations, like Beryl Company and Google, invest in their workers as valuable assets and believe that spirituality can improve this investment in addition to effective leadership. It was further elaborated that the characteristics of effective leader and identify the need of servant leadership in organizations in the twenty-first century (Spears, 2010).The study of Fortune Magazine was used that highlights 100 best companies in the west which have focused on servant leadership as a part of their corporate culture. Although it is paradoxical to associate a leader as a servant, but as our knowledge expands in today’s information age, leaders sense that subordinates have diversified in skills and abilities thus leading with power and dictation may be ill advised. Leaders in serving capacity can make workplace more meaningful(Wong and Page, 2003). Spirituality in organization is not a hypothetical concept but increases employee commitment, adaptability and most importantly the level of motivation with which employees are working. Thus servant leadership can be a valuable tool to increase workplace spirituality and leaving workplace to be more significant (Jurkeiwicz and Giacalone, 2004). Contemporary organizations in public sector of Pakistan and hospitality industries are facing challenges
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Pakistan Journal of Science (Vol. 67 No.1March, 2015)
Theoretical Model of Organizational Culture, its Relationship between Servant Leadership and Workplace Spirituality
Organizational Culture Empowerment Team Orientation Capability Development OCQ Denison (2005)
Servant Altruism Leadership
Workplace pirituality MeaningfulSWork
Emotional Healing Wisdom Persuasive Mapping Stewardship SLQ (Barbuto& Wheeler, 2005) MATERIALS AND METHODS
Sense of Community Alignment with Organizational Values WSQ (Ashmos&Duchon, 2000)
(moderating variable) were also adopted from the work of(Denison, 2000), who used four different facets to measure the organizational culture i.e. involvement culture, consistency culture, adaptability culture and mission culture. However in the current study only involvement culture was used as its facet, which overlapped with the dimensions of workplace spirituality. From work of Denison, fifteen questions were used to measure the role of involvement culture as moderator. Researcher also used judgmental sampling and sent 250 questionnaires to the respondents of Pakistan Agricultural Research Council Islamabad, Pakistan Institute of Developmental Economics (PIDE), Islamabad and Pakistan Television Network Islamabad, and received back 214 questionnaires i.e., (86% response rate). Questionnaires were forwarded to the managers and officials who were directly in contact/observing the leaders of their respective organizations.
This study was carried to measure the servant leadership, workplace spirituality and the involvement of culture as a moderator, by three quantitative scales. Servant Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ):To measure this independent variable SLQ developed by was used (Barbuto and Wheeler, 2006) was used. The scale contained 23 items measured on a 4-point Likert-type scale, (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = somewhat disagree, 3 = somewhat agree, 4 = strongly agree).Five different facets of servant leadership were measured i.e. altruistic calling, emotional healing, wisdom, persuasive mapping and organizational stewardship (higher scores on these subscales represented greater magnitude of these facets). Reliability analysis for SLQ was 0.879 with a scale containing 23 items. Workplace Spirituality Questionnaire (WSQ): Workplace spirituality was measured through the standardized instrument (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000). The complete questionnaire consisted of 66 items, divided into seven factors and three parts. In this study the authors used three parts of this questionnaire which assessed the work, sense of community and alignment of values. For workplace spirituality, seventeen questions were used measuring consequential work, sense of community and alignment with organizational values. Reliability of 17 items used was 0.822
RESULTS Regression analysis revealed that servant leadership had a positive and significant relationship with workplace spirituality (r = .66, p< 0.001; R2 (adjusted) = .44), supporting our first hypothesis (H1). Servant leadership was 44% of workplace spirituality, and showed that servant leadership had a positive impact on workplace spirituality. A single factor Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tested the model, where servant leadership was selected as an independent variable and workplace spirituality as dependent variable. Ahighly
Organizational Culture Questionnaire (OCQ): Standardized questions of organizational culture
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Pakistan Journal of Science (Vol. 67 No.1March, 2015) revealed a high correlation (r = .70 p
