Year of Award

2009

Document Type

Professional Paper

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Communication Studies

Department or School/College

Department of Communication Studies

Committee Chair

Betsy Bach

Keywords

communication, Spirit, spirituality, strategies

Publisher

University of Montana

Abstract

Many organizational leaders and employees have become increasingly interested in implementing some form of spiritual practice or orientation into the fabric of the workplace. A burgeoning field of research and practice has emerged in the past two decades that attempts to address this growing interest. This field is diverse and identified with various titles, the most common being “spirit at work,” “spirituality in the workplace,” “faith at work,” and “faith in the workplace.” Because any cognates of the words “spirit” and “faith” are universally associated with religion, implementing any form of spiritual practice or orientation into a workplace setting comes with multiple challenges, not the least of which being the ways in which the concepts involved are communicated to organizational members. This paper examines such implementation in the context of communication, investigating the communicative strategies employed by practitioners and consultants in this area. Three interviews were conducted with practitioners who introduced spiritual principles to three separate organizations. Interviews were then conducted with the three organizational representatives with whom these practitioners worked. Emphasis was placed on investigating the approaches utilized by practitioners in their attempts to successfully communicate the subject matter, and on the perceptions of the organizational representatives regarding the effectiveness of the communicative strategies that were utilized by practitioners. The concluding section includes implications for practitioners and organizational leaders, as well as recommendations for future study.

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© Copyright 2009 Matthew Alan Condon