Mitroff, Ian. I. (2000)
Spirituality at work: the next major challenge in management, in T.C. Pauchant and Associates, Ethics and spirituality at work. Under revision in the U.S.
In this chapter, Ian I. Mitroff, an influential management scholar and a renowned consultant, presents the results of one of the first scientific studies on spirituality at work.
The study that he has recently conducted, includes 230 managers and top executives in the U.S. Many of the results are counter to what common knowledge would have us expect. We learn, for example, that 92% of managers would like to include spiritual principles in their organization but that they refrain to do so for different reasons including the lack of practical examples and models, their need to stay critical and not to be associated with the new age trend or the wish to be respectful of themselves and others. As another example, while these managers perceive differently the notions of spirituality and religion, all of them agree that more spirituality at work would allow them to live a more integrated and more systemic life as well as allow their organization to become a world class organization. Lastly we learn from this important research some of the conditions and processes required to develop a more spiritual or ethical organization . This includes, for example, the need of a crisis for starting the process of transformation; the need of a higher ethical plane and very different rules; or the need to challenge the traditional view that spiritual matters are only personal and to instead consider that they need to be institutionalized as well. The chapter concludes by providing a typology of the different paths that could be taken by organizations for transforming themselves and discloses the moral outrage experienced by the author by the lack of scientific research conducted on this paramount subject.
