The role of spirituality in promoting ethical leadership cannot be understated. This is especially true in today’s world, where organization leaders have been breaching moral and ethical standards through fraudulent misrepresentation and corruption. The low ethical climate, scandals, and corruption can have devastating consequences, including criminal charges and failed businesses.
Ethics is a crucial element of business success. Without it, unethical business practices and criminal behavior will occur, and businesses wouldn’t flourish. Introducing spirituality in the workplace equips leaders for ethical leadership tasks, avoiding costly ethical issues and laying the foundation for the organization’s or business’s long-term success.
If you want to make a meaningful impact in your specialty area, enrolling in an online EdD program available in Washington can help you grow professionally, ethically, and intellectually as a leader who drives positive change. Here are a few ways that spirituality can positively impact ethical leadership in your organization:
1. Brings a Sense of Mission and Meaning
As a leader, having a sense of meaning and mission can encourage you to prioritize ethics. On the other hand, unethical action often devalues work and puts your company’s mission at risk.
Workplace spirituality brings a desire for meaningful work to achieve organizational goals. This motivates your employees to display their tenacity and improve their performance in accomplishing challenging tasks. This helps you achieve your company’s goals and greater sustainability, improve productivity and reduce turnover.
2. Encourages Putting Others First
Ethical leaders usually put others ahead of themselves by showing kindness, compassion, concern, generosity, love and care. On the contrary, unethical leaders often put their needs first and use others for their own benefit. Spirituality helps motivate you to demonstrate selfless concern for others’ well-being by putting their needs first.
Treating employees with respect and compassion, in turn, helps foster selfless behavior in them. This is especially crucial since employees usually respect leaders who acknowledge their shortcomings instead of glossing over them. They will also judge your character based on how you treat them.
3. Fosters Integrity, Humility, and Justice
Spirituality motivates leaders to act ethically, maintain humility, and treat others justly. Doing these practices consistently helps build ethical leaders with integrity and honesty. A lack of integrity can instantly undermine your moral authority as a leader. As such, a single untrustworthy behavior can quickly damage years of consistent behavior. Dealing with others honestly can make them see you as a moral leader and role model.
Through spirituality, you gain humility, a critical element of ethical leadership. As a humble leader, you build supportive relationships, serve others, and are always open to new ideas and opinions of others. You also treat everyone fairly and justly, regardless of their nationality, gender, or ethnicity.
Endnote
As you’ve seen, a company’s spiritual progress can significantly impact its leaders’ spiritual development. As such, spirituality in the workplace nurtures and promotes ethical leadership, which is vital for the long-term success of any business.
Stronger ethical leadership at the workplace can improve employee performance, commitment, and overall operations performance. Ethical leaders will also better avoid scandals and create ideal conditions for everyone to thrive and for business success.
