Spiritual development and meaningful work: a Habermasian critique

ABSTRACT

A dominant theme of the workplace spirituality discourse in HRD is its transformational nature which enables an organization to imbue work with purpose and meaning. Empirical studies have shown that providing meaningful work to employees enhances several indicators of organizational performance. However, this discourse ignores that such organizational interventions are shaped by capitalist power relations in which the organization is embedded. In this paper, I apply a critical theory perspective drawing from the work of Jurgen Habermas to show that workplace spirituality movement has emerged in response to the loss of meanings inherent in neoliberal capitalism. However, since this movement is operating on a logic of performativity and instrumental rationality, it represents an attempt to re-orient individual subjectivity and the spiritual realm of human experience to serve capitalism.     

Overload Stress Perceptions of Public Sector Employees in Pakistan: a Study of Gender,Age, and Education in South Asia

Public Organization Review - Stress impacts all employees in the private and public sectors. This study was conducted with public sector organizations to measure the stress perception of employees...     

Divide and rule: The effects of diversity and network structure on a firm's sustainability performance

To tackle sustainability, firms often use partnerships with organizations from different industries or societal sectors such as government and civil society. While partnerships show potential for firms to improve their sustainability performance, they not only lead to a potential to learn from diversity but also to tensions due to a lack of unity between partners. In partnerships for sustainability, this unity-diversity tension particularly manifests itself in different views of sustainability. This paper examines how this tension affects the sustainability performance of firms taking part in partnerships for sustainability in developing countries. To address this question, this tension is conceptualized as being the result of differences in organizational frames and institutional logics between a focal firm and other organizations in the partnership. It is also taken into consideration that firms are embedded in an overarching, relational network structure that allows them to manage the diversity in frames and logics. To test the hypotheses, the study analyses 1353 greenhouse gas emission reduction projects of 322 firms from developing countries active in the carbon-offset market from 2007 to 2009. The findings show that if partners hold different frames and belong to different sectors, a firm's sustainability performance improves first due to learning from diversity but after a turning point decreases from a lack of unity. This inverse U-shape relationship is flipped if a firm occupies a brokerage position in its network.