Towards Spiritually Powered Organizations: A Review on the Effect of Organizational Aesthetics on Building Workplace Spirituality

Abstract

An unprecedented number of scientific studies have been published to explain how to enhance organizational effectiveness by recognizing its key predictors to stimulate the performance of firms. But, optimizing the performance in any organization is still an unaddressed challenge. If the rational antecedents in an organization are unsuccessful to address this issue, scholars must examine the non-rational aspects of people and organizations to find a sustainable solution. Workplace spirituality is such a non-rational aspect in a firm that could increasingly grab scholarly attention in recent decades. This conceptual paper investigates the predictors of workplace spirituality from an aesthetic point of view at work because existing literature in this domain mostly involves exploring the associations of its potential organizational outcomes rather than digging deeper into its predictors. A notable record in literature proves that aesthetical interventions in organizations can have a significant influence on improving the spirituality of employees at work, but the association between organizational aesthetics and workplace spirituality is largely ignored. On the other hand, the literature in organizational studies mostly allows the logical components as envisioned predictors of organizational outcomes such as organizational effectiveness, productivity, citizenship behavior, and employee engagement, whereas alternatively, scholars in aesthetics strongly believe that the spiritual aspect at work significantly determines positive organizational outcomes as previously said. However, the question of what drives workplace spirituality remains unaddressed. Hence, this paper attempts to answer that question with reference to the workplace spirituality theory by drawing major contributions from organizational aesthetic theory and organizational learning theory. The initial conceptualization was built by summarizing the existing literature in a systematic way. Six hypotheses were developed in the conceptualization by bringing three (03) antecedents on workplace spirituality from the perspective of organizational aesthetics. The conclusion of this conceptualization can be found in the latter part.