Examining the relationship between Spirituality and Job Satisfaction

Abstract

The potential benefits of Spirituality in organisations have been generating much interest in the research literature and the research community, in recent years, but relatively few empirical studies have been conducted to demonstrate the relationships between Spirituality and other major variables used in organisational research. One of those major variables is Job Satisfaction, which has been studied for many years, and which is known to affect other important organisational phenomena such as absenteeism, staff retention, motivation, productivity and even profitability. This quantitative study uses structural equation modelling to analyse data collected via empirically-validated measurement scales, from a large and diverse sample, to investigate the presumed relationship between Spirituality and Job Satisfaction. While controlling for common method variance (CMV), the structural equation models confirmed a modest but significant relationship between Spirituality and Job Satisfaction (r = 0.2). More interestingly, they also revealed quite divergent relationships between Job Satisfaction and three Spirituality subscales: interconnection with a higher power (n.s.), interconnection with human beings (r = 0.4), and interconnection with nature (r = -0.3). These last findings are surprising. They complicate the assumed relationship between Spirituality and Job Satisfaction and provoke questions for further investigation.