Workplace spirituality : a bibliometric analysis

Research into workplace spirituality has been growing strongly since the mid-1990s, according to Web of Science statistics. At the same time, there are clear differences amongst authors as to the focus of this topic. Some are interested in how religious ideas and beliefs can affect managers and workers in work. Others are more concerned with the contemporary search for meaning in employment work, and what managers might do to facilitate this. In this paper, we offer a bibliometric analysis of trends and patterns in the research article literature from the early 1990s to 2014, focusing on studies concerning the employment relationship. We draw on bibliographic databases, principally the Web of Science, to analyse citation patterns to identify foundational works, and to trace lines of inquiry through historical citations patterns. We also identify clusters of authors indicating different foci of interest. This paper extends work by Oswick (2009) in terms of the temporal scope of the study, and by identifying and exploring co-citation networks, to present an analytical picture of the evolving intellectual scope of this field. Implications for further research are discussed