Abstract
D.Phil. (Leadership in Performance and Change)
Orientation: This thesis presents a model of spirituality in the workplace. Spirituality
in the workplace has largely been avoided or neglected in the banking sector and is
therefore ill understood. It shows little theoretical development and could very well be
the next competitive advantage for business.
Research question: A general research question guided the study, namely: "What
are the subjective experiences of spirituality of a manager in a South African retail
bank and how can these assist scholars in reaching an understanding of spirituality
at work?”
Research aim and objectives: The aim of the study was to explore and describe
the concrete experiences and views of a branch manager of a retail bank with regard
to spirituality in the workplace and to develop a model of it. The key objectives of the
study were:
· To develop an appropriate qualitative research approach to capture and unravel
the experiences and views of the bank manager;
· To study the work of prominent scholars in associated study fields in order to
infer abstract constructs that could be used as analytic tools to illuminate the
world of the bank manager, and
· To develop a model of spirituality in the workplace by applying first-order
constructs, that is, the concrete experiences and viewpoints of the manager, as
well as second-order constructs, that is, the abstract concepts of scholars.
Motivation for the study: Knowledge of spirituality in the workplace is in its infancy
in the banking sector. Interest in the topic was raised by existential questions such
as: Who are you? Where are you going? Why are you going there? The fact that
human beings ask these questions, seek meaning and ask about the purpose of life
fascinated me. This fascination was not limited to individuals' personal lives; I wanted
to know more about spirituality as it is lived and felt in the workplace where workers
spend a third of their lives; I also wanted to know the value of spirituality in the
workplace for organisations. This finally led to my submission of a research proposal
titled "Towards developing a model for spirituality in the workplace". The model I
developed for spirituality in the workplace organises information in such a way that
the relationships among the various elements are clarified. This theoretical
framework provides an understanding for spirituality in the workplace.
Research approach: A modernist qualitative research approach was employed,
since I wanted to give my research participant a voice regarding spirituality in the
workplace. The interpretive-constructivist research philosophy, and more particularly
the assumption that reality is constructed by individuals interacting with their social
worlds, underpinned my research. The research data were collected by means of a
life history and analysed using Strauss and Corbin’s grounded theory.
Regarding data management and storage, I followed Bogdan and Biklen’s (2007,
p. 118) advice: pledge to keep your data physically well organised; develop a plan on
how to achieve this; ensure that you stick to your plan; create a back-up system;
have hard copies of all the recorded data in a manual filing system to secure
valuable and often irreplaceable data should your computer become infected with a
virus or dysfunctional for some other reason. I also ensured that all the data, whether
paper-based or electronic, were kept safe and confidential.
The writing style was mainly the scientific tale, but confessional, realist and
autoethnographic tales were also used. The entire research process was influenced
by symbolic interactionism, that is, seeing meaning as something that arises from the
interaction between people, especially when they seek understanding of the world in
which they work and live. Meaning was constructed through the researcher’s
questions to, and discussions and interactions with the research participant.