Spiritual Leadership and Employees’ Spiritual Wellbeing: Practical Remedies for Contemporary Service Organizations’ Challenges

The paramount aim of this dissertation was to examine the association of spiritual leadership with individual level outcomes, with the intent to expand the literature of spiritual leadership and address some of the key organizational and societal issues such as wellbeing, sustainable work climate, and mutual involvement with stakeholders for the community welfare. Two empirical studies presented in chapter three and four were carried out to meet this objective. Before that, an overview of the evolution of leadership studies is briefly presented in chapter two. The study presented in chapter three investigates employee customer–oriented boundary-spanning behaviors as an outcome of spiritual leadership, through the mediating role of employee spiritual survival and well-being under the framework of social exchange and social identity theories. The PROCESS macro was used to analyze data collected from 5-star hotels full-time frontline employees in Antalya, Turkey. Results indicated that the association of spiritual leadership on the three dimensions of customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors was mediated by spiritual survival and spiritual well-being. Spirituality appears to be a noteworthy but remote contributor to customer engagement via employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors. The study contributed to the boundary-spanning and customer engagement literature by illustrating that a sense of mission and wellbeing at the workplace are adequate requirements to engage a frontline employee, whose boundary-spanning behaviors will be instrumental in fostering customer engagement. The second empirical study of dissertation presented in chapter four contributes to the ongoing discussion stressing the need to reinvigorate meaning and purpose to the younger generation of employees and revitalize the essence of hospitality. To this end, the study proposes and tests a model of how spiritual leadership and emotional intelligence are related, directly and indirectly through spiritual wellbeing, to the creative performance and customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors (COBSB) of employees. The research hypotheses were tested using data collected from 238 frontline hotel employees and 53 supervisors and analyzed via nonlinear estimations. The findings revealed that spiritual leadership and emotional intelligence were curvilinearly related to spiritual wellbeing, COBSB, and creative performance. Specifically, too much of spiritual leadership was not necessarily a good thing, and the less emotionally intelligent can sometimes be better off. Moreover, spiritual wellbeing mediated the relationship of emotional intelligence and spiritual leadership with COBSB and creative performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed further in each chapter.