In a recent training on cultural competence, I asked a room what were the two things we typically don’t talk about in public in American culture: the answer was a resounding “religion and politics!” As a public space, this answer holds true for most workplaces as well. And yet, although the ways Americans self-identify as religious is rapidly changing, the numbers of people who consider themselves spiritual or religious are as high as ever. There are also growing numbers of organizations that identify with religious ideals—from Christian based Chick-Fila to Buddhist inspired LinkedIn. On the academic side of the fence, there seems to be growing attention to the role that workplace spirituality (WPS) plays in organizational outcomes—evidenced by things like the creation of academic journals dedicated to religion and spirituality at work. So how do we make sense of the overwhelming presence of religion and spirituality around work and the simultaneous silence around what it is, what it means, and what to do with it?
There are at least two reasons for this disconnect. First, we still do not talk about religious and spiritual beliefs as parts of our particular cultures like we do other diversity dimensions. If you ask someone about their communication style for example, they can comfortably rattle off the cultural reasons for the ways they naturally handle conflict. But religious values tend to run deep with people and so there remains a sense that these ideals are somehow beyond culture—they’re supernatural. I will leave the discussion about the existence of God, gods, and spiritual realities for another time, but there are reasons why beliefs also tend to follow geographical and cultural boundary lines—because as real as they may be, they’re also cultural.
In fact, all of our deepest held values are cultural. Even unquestioned norms of popular business practice are largely parts of our cultural milieu more than time-tested truths. Our insistence on the power of positive thinking, self-management, and personal strengths find their correlative in charismatic forms of Christianity in charisma, spiritual discipline, and spiritual gifts. But because we typically think of religious values as “otherworldly” and business practice as grounded in reality, we don’t stop to investigate how much of what we value in organizations is actually spiritual and religious in nature.
The second reason I think we tend not to explicitly deal with religion and spirituality at work is because we have not included it as an aspect of a progression in cultural competence. We tend to think about religious and spiritual beliefs as closed sets of ideals that you either have or you don’t. This kind of all-or-nothing view of the way religion works closes off the possibility for religiously diverse people to exchange, adopt and experience with differently religious others. It also creates an environment were individuals who are open to exploring spiritual possibilities for themselves, do so in isolation. Just last weekend I was talking to a friend who I’ve known for some time who shared with me his experience quitting his full time job in finance to study theology at Yale. When I asked him about why, he simply explained that it was something new that he’d always wanted to do. He is now back working at a bank and not sure how his experience studying theology will shape how he works, but he says he was powerfully shaped for the better—is this not also professional development?
One advantage of the growing preference for identifying as spiritual versus religious in American culture is the addition of a sense of mystery. Although spirituality is sometimes experienced through religion, it doesn’t have to be. And identifying as spiritual, especially at work, is usually seen as less divisive than religious. Either way, I think there is something healthy about the freedom to be honest about the complexities and diverse manifestations of religion and spirituality at work. With so many people strongly identifying as either, it is doubtful that these ideals do not shape the way that people approach work. One way to encourage more open dialogue and inclusive business practices around religion is to investigate the ways all religions and spiritual movements share a degree of mystery and complexity. This “open” space is more promising for safe workplace dialogues, cross-religious exchange of ideas, and innovative ways of thinking spiritually than the more polarized ways of thinking about religion.
