A EUPSYCHIAN PERSPECTIVE OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP

Arménio Rego Miguel Pina e CunhaUniversidade Nova de LisboaUniversidade de Aveiro

Portugal

Miguel OliveiraUniversidade do Minho

Eupsychian Management

“Eupshychian” was coined by A Maslow, in Eupshychian Management (1965)

It comes from the combination of eu, meaning good (i.e., euphoria) and psyche, meaning mind or soul.

Eupshychian means “having a good mind/soul”, “toward a good mind/soul” or “the well-being of psyche” .

Eupshychia is the society or organization where human beings naturally strive to become “self-actualizing”.

Eupsychian Management

Maslow was mainly excited by the possibility that

employment could provide people with the opportunity

to satisfy their higher order needs for self-esteem and

self-actualization

Organizations and HR systems should be designed according to 36 assumptions that enlightened managers would adopt

Assume (e.g.,)...•Everyone is to be trusted.

•Everyone can enjoy good teamwork, good group harmony, good belongingness, and group love.

•Everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, disrespected

•Everyone prefers or perhaps even needs to love his boss (rather than to hate him)…

•All human beings, not only eupsychian ones, prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.

•The preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in contrast to being anonymous or interchangeable).

•A tendency to identify with more and more of the world, moving toward the ultimate of mysticism, a fusion with the world, or peak experience, cosmic consciousness, etc.

•We shall have to work out the assumption of the metamotives and the metapathologies, of the yearning for the “B-values”, i.e., truth, beauty, justice, perfection, and so on.

Virtuous circles

Managers’ self-actualization (i.e., enlightened managers) can

produce virtuous circles in organizations, i.e., self-

actualization in other people, since they can satisfy lower

order needs (i.e., physical, safety and social ones).

This is good for improving employees’ health and well-being, and for the organization’s performance as well.

This, in turn, may lead people to internalize B values (e.g.,

wholeness, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, humor,

completion, playfulness).

“Stimuli” for our research

Spirituality is a recent vigorous stream of literature, although

empirical research is still scarce.

Few studies relate leadership behaviors with WS.

Several notions offered in definitions of spirituality (Hicks,

2002) evoke the notion of eupshychian management

(e.g., self-actualization, self-fulfillment, wholeness, harmony,

balance, meaning, vitality, energy, virtue, wisdom, truth,

freedom and interconnectedness).

Research questions

1. What leaders’ behaviors (dis)respect employees’ perceptions of workplace spirituality?

2. How do employees declare to react to these behaviors?

3. Do employees incorporate religion in their sense of workplace spirituality?

4. What kind and proportion of positive and negative leaders’ behaviors do employees report when invited to narrate events about leaders’ behaviors and their impacts on workplace spirituality?

Method

Critical incident technique.

A convenience sample of 105 employees from 53 organizations

Mean age: 32.3 years

Mean contact time between employees & leaders: 4.1 years

68.6% - female

3% - basic education28% - secondary education69% - university education

Three “moments”

1. Individuals were informed that WS refers to workplace opportunities to perform meaningful work in the context of a community with a sense of joy and respect for inner-life.

2. They were asked to report two events in which their leaders respected or disrespected WS.

3. After describing each incident, they were asked to report how they reacted to the leader’s behavior.

175 useful critical incidents

120 referring to disrespectful behaviors of workplace spirituality (“anti-eupshychian” events)

55 to respectful behaviors (“eupshychian” events)

Leadership behaviors:the two researchers reached the same classification in

75% of incidents

Employees’ reactions:Coefficient of agreement - 80%.

For resolving the divergences: several iterations through e-mail interactions and face-to-face meetings

Findings

Leadership behaviors The leader:

Number of times the behavior

was mentioned

Number of times the employee reaction was mentioned

Psychologi-cal well being

Commit-ment and sense of calling

Positive behaviors

and attitudes toward

supervisor

Sense of self-worth

(being appreciated)

Promotes self-determination and employee personal development.

25 14 15 1 5

Respects personal and inner life of employees.

10 5 3 3 2

Is kind, compassionate, loyal and respectful.

8 4 1 3 1

Promotes positive interpersonal relationships and the sense of team community.

7 1 3 3 0

Is courageous and open-minded. 5 5 1 2 0

Effects of eupsychian leadership behaviors

Effects of anti-eupsychian leadersh. behaviors Leadership behaviorsThe leader:

Number of times

Number of times the employee reaction was mentioned

Voice, complai-ning and upward appeal

Negative emotions

and feelings

Neglect, passivity

and silence (passive

response)

Retaliation/ disobedi-

ence (active

response)

Decrea-sing role

and extra-role

perfor-mance

Exit Effects on the team

Relation-ship with

and feelings toward

the super-visor

Power abuses. 62 26 21 9 8 10 2 5 2

Is ruthless/cruel/unkind

19 9 8 3 3 2 2 0 0

Disrespects personal and inner life of employees

17 4 4 7 3 0 2 1 1

Is lazy and coward 13 7 2 2 2 1 0 0 2

Is dishonest and false 9 4 3 1 3 0 1 0 1

Discriminates employees

8 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1

Instigates bad interp. Relationships

5 2 1 1 1 0 1 1 0

Discussion and

conclusions

The realism of the utopian Eupsychia

• As the POS and WS literatures have shown, Maslow’s quest for eupsychian organizations appears to be more realistic that some criticisms regarding their allegedly utopian aims would suggest (Payne, 2000).

•Eisler & Montouori (2003) epitomized this assumption arguing that there is mounting evidence that a more humane workplace is more productive, flexible and creative.

Prevalence of anti-eupsychian events

Real proportion of eupsychian and anti-eupsychian events in organizations?

Do some kind of “negative deviance” induces people to recall and be more sensitive to the negative side of organizational functioning?

A paradoxical possibility of a “positive deviance? (assuming that people expect to be well treated, negative events become more salient in their minds).

Limitations and future studies

• Moderating variables were not considered.

• Critical incident technique has some drawbacks and limitations.

• Sequence of events were not considered.

Final comments

Ghoshal & Moran’s (2005) good theory of management, the interest for Indian philosophies (Engardio, 2006), and the positive scholarship movement (Cameron et al., 2004), are recent examples of the “Eupsychian turn”.

In our research, we suggested that enlightened managers, as Maslow called them, may contribute toward creating eupsychian islands, and presented some practices that distinguish these eupsychian leaders from their “realist” counterparts.

Thank you so much