Spiritual Leadership and Workplace Outcomes: An Interpretive Structural Equation Modeling (ISEM) Approach

Workplace Spirituality has become an important paradigm within the field of organization studies, stressing on ethical leadership, employee’s well-being and sustainable performance. Several aspects were included as dimensions of spiritual leadership: vision, faith, altruistic love, membership, and meaning/calling and the relationship between spiritual leadership and job satisfaction, employee engagement, and counterproductive work behavior were established. Its importance is increasing, yet little is known quantitatively and structurally about the effect of a heterogeneous staff on workplace outcomes. Interpretive structural equation modeling (ISEM) was used to investigate the hierarchical relationships among the dimensions of spiritual leadership and several important workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction, employee engagement, job performance, workplace deviance, and employee turnover. Results indicate that spiritual leadership is a foundational motivational factor that creates satisfaction and engagement, and therefore contributes to performance, lowers turnover, and minimizes deviant behaviors in the workplace. By combining interpretive and structural analysis, this study has practical implications for organizational behavior literature and offers a theory that leaders, human resource practitioners, and researchers can use to strategically leverage spiritual leadership to create ethical, engaged, and high-performing organizations.