Spiritual Leadership: Meaning in the Sustainable Workplace

Abstract

The topic of leadership enjoys unflagging interest among management theorists and practitioners. One of the trends that arose in the 1990s is spiritual leadership. Some authors have pointed out the importance of spiritual leadership is to create a sustainable workplace for employees. Thus, there is a need to present the achievements of academic knowledge in this topic. The aim of the paper is to synthesize research in the emerging spiritual leadership theory and its importance for the creation of a sustainable workplace. This study explores the concept of spiritual leadership and proposes a conceptual model of spiritual leadership within the context of the sustainability of the workplace. The study is based on a literature review and bibliometric analysis of 373 publications from the Scopus database, spanning the period from 1980 to 2019. The findings obtained indicate that the development of the spiritual leadership theory is relevant and applicable to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable workplace for employees.