Hidden key to leadership? It may be spirituality
In 2005, three management scholars set out to study something business schools had long treated as taboo. Eric Dent, Eileen Higgins, and Deborah Wharff read 87 academic papers on spirituality in the workplace. They were not writing a sermon, but building a dataset.
The findings were striking. Among the papers that took a clear position on performance, 48 found evidence linking spirituality to it. Only one found no relationship at all.
For decades, business schools ran the other way. Leadership got measured by revenue, retention and quarterly numbers. Spirituality resisted all three. It rarely showed up cleanly in a spreadsheet or a turnover chart, even when researchers tried surveys and interviews instead. That made spirituality the embarrassing cousin of leadership theory, mentioned in commencement speeches and avoided in serious research.
That separation is harder to defend than it looks. The 2005 review sorted the scholarship into eight distinct categories, covering how spirituality was defined, whether it connected to religion and whether it could be taught, measured or tied to productivity. For most of those categories, different reviewers coded the same papers independently and then compared notes. Their agreement ranged from solid to excellent. That does not prove spirituality causes better performance. It does show that spirituality at work can be studied with the same care as any other subject in management research.
Here, a distinction matters. Researchers are not talking about a leader's private faith. What they measure is workplace spirituality, meaning whether employees feel their work has meaning, whether they feel connected to the people around them and whether their job nourishes something beyond a paycheck. That is different from a leader's personal beliefs. The strongest findings link this sense of purpose to trust, ethical behavior and forms of performance well beyond revenue. The findings get shakier the moment someone stretches them into claims about one leader's inner depth or character.
Popular leadership writing got here first, just without the data. Faith-based leadership authors have long argued that character outlasts charisma. Corporate coaching books now make a similar case in secular language, pushing reflection and purpose over metrics alone. Neither tradition counts as scientific proof. Much of it rests on testimony and conviction, not evidence. Still, it is worth noting that practitioners arrived at this idea through experience long before researchers did through method.
The research has real limits too. Much of it relies on people describing their own experience through surveys, often taken at a single point in time rather than tracked over years. A workplace full of engaged, spiritually minded employees might simply be a healthy company that attracts such people, rather than proof that spirituality made it healthy. Until longer-term studies follow the same people and organizations over time, the direction of causation remains an open question.
None of this diminishes what is at stake. Leaders who have faced real suffering, mortality or the limits of their own control may become more patient and better able to sit with uncertainty than leaders who respond to pressure with panic. That remains a hypothesis, not a proven fact. But any organization that takes the possibility seriously must protect the freedom and dignity of the people who work there. Spirituality cannot become a demand that employees reveal their beliefs or adopt a leader’s worldview.
The real question is not whether a company can make people spiritual. It is whether an organization can make room for meaning and belonging without forcing anyone to believe on command. The evidence has already made that question legitimate. The harder question is what a leader owes to their own inner life, and whether an organization should entrust real power to someone who has never asked what gives their own life meaning.
Choi Hee-jin is an educator and practical theologian, Yale Divinity School fellow (2025–2026), exploring medical humanities at Duke. She writes about medicine, technology, and human flourishing, with imagination and hope.