Leadership and Spiritual Capital: Exploring the Link between Individual Service Disposition and Organizational Value

Researchers have made considerable advances integrating spirituality and organizational leadership (Fry, 2003; Benefiel, 2005). The concept of spiritual capital has developed as a way of explaining and perhaps advocating this integration in a secular context (Baker & Miles-Watson, 2008). This paper explores the development of spiritual capital as a multi-level form of organizational value, operating at the individual level as the disposition to serve, and subsequently at the organizational level as systems, norms, and culture. The various conceptualizations of spiritual capital are examined and extended, specifically focusing on the nature and development of a key individual level motivation—the call to serve. The authors provide a base from which to discuss implications and applications for leadership across levels of analysis and sectors of practice, all to the end of fostering spiritual capital in organizations. Organizations, and the individuals who lead them, continue to wrestle with the balance between fiscal viability and social sustainability. It has been 30 years since Robert Greenleaf explicitly linked service to organizational success, and far longer since the world‘s major religions have asserted the ―golden rule. ‖ And although organized religion continues to lose ground, with fewer and fewer people identifying with any specific religious community and attending churches, mosques, synagogues etc., about 85 % of the world‘s population continues t