Business Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Reader

Chapter 38. Nourishing the Soul of the Leader: Inner Growth Matters

Andre L. Delbecq

This chapter posits that spiritual maturity informs organizational leadership in important ways. It is written to provoke reflection on the questions of how and why that is so.

Early in my academic career, speaking of God, transcendence, or spirituality in the context of work was out of bounds. Psychology and sociology were the mother disciplines of leadership. For many, even ethics was a doubtful overlay of philosophy. It is not surprising then that when the workplace spirituality movement emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, it did so within the world of practice—outside the university and even largely outside mainstream churches, temples, and ...