The Spiritual Side of Organizational Life

Employees find themselves treated as organizational fat that can be eradicated at any time, liposuctioned via the hygienic notion of outplacement. Organizations are flattened and otherwise hammered into shape. Employees become expendable even at the highest levels. These trends are more than distressing, they are disheartening and personally disorganizing. Organizations are having their social fabric ripped apart. Employees are faced with possible career annihilation and the inability to support their families. They are metaphorically packed into cattle cars and hauled out of the organizations that they have often served with a lifetime of loyal work. In the end one can think of dislocations of this magnitude and depravity as destroying the spirit within the workplace as well as the human spirit (Allcorn, 2002 and Allcorn, S., et al., 1996).

Overlooked in this milieu of organizational destruction has been the much earlier work of Roethlisberger, Dickson and Wright (1939) who caution, “This resistance (to change) was expressed whenever changes were introduced too rapidly or without sufficient consideration of their social implications; in other words, whenever the workers were being asked to adjust themselves to new methods or systems which seemed to them to deprive their work of its customary social significance” (p. 567). The same authors also remind us, “But the relation of the individual employee to the company is not a closed system. All the values of the individual cannot be accounted for by the social organization of the company. The meaning a person assigns to his position depends on whether or not the position is allowing him to fulfill the social demands he is making of his work. The ultimate significance of his work is not defined so much by his relation to the company as by his relation to the wider social reality” (p. 375).

Mary Parker Follett, who wrote in the first quarter of the twentieth century, if consulted today, would no doubt caution against management fads such as downsizing, restructuring and reengineering. She writes:

There are leaders who do not appeal to man’s complacency but to all their best impulses, their greatest capacities, their deepest desires. I think it was Emerson who told us of those who supply us with new powers out of the recesses of the spirit and urge us to new and unattempted performance. This is far more than imitating your leader. In this conception of Emerson’s, what you receive from your leader does not come from him, but from the “recesses of the spirit.” Whoever connects me with the hidden springs of all life, whoever increases the sense of life in me, he is my leader. (Metcalf and Urwick, 1941, p. 294)

Indeed as we begin the 21st century one wonders why, if methods such as downsizing and reengineering the corporation metaphorically cut the heart out of an organization and diminish the spirit of employees in America, warnings of other contemporary management writers have been disregarded. Vaill (1989) reminds us that, “A culture is a system of attitudes, actions, and artifacts that endures over time and that operates to produce among its members a relatively unique common psychology” (p. 147). He goes on to note, “True culture change is systemic change at a deep psychological level involving attitudes, actions, and artifacts that have developed over substantial periods of time” (Vaill, 1989, pp. 149–50). This appreciation seems to provide an important warning for the advocates of downsizing and reengineering. Abrupt and sweeping change can destroy the culture and with it the soul of an organization.

Another organization theorist, Bergquist (1993), notes, “Greater attention must be given to organizational culture and to creating a strong feeling of solidarity; otherwise, organizations will increasingly be experienced as fragmented and inconsistent” (p. 42). And more profoundly he suggests, “The culture of an organization provides the glue that holds the organization’s diverse elements together and creates a sense of continuity among those working in and leading the organization” (p. 47). These considerations speak to the importance of the spiritual nature of the workplace. Creating organizational change that destroys the spiritual side of the workplace and the spirituality of employees may well plant the seeds of failure requiring yet another round of destructive organizational change (Allcorn, 2002). I now turn to another complex dimension for examining the workplace, that of the psychological and social side of the workplace, and the accompanying organizational dynamics.