Expressions of Spiritually Inspired Leadership in the Public Sector : Calling for a New Paradigm in Developing Leaders

This is a dissertation for contemporary times. It is a story of intellectual and spiritual growth and renewal, a narrative account of the events that helped to shape the author’s worldview of leadership and organizational life. This dissertation documents a two-year long action research project for which the author was a complete-member researcher. This is a documentary of a research approach that can be used to shape and co-create reality of what spirituality means in context of leadership, and make research more relevant to the lives of workplace managers. This dissertation integrates several distinct pieces of empirical research that explore the meaning of spirituality in context of public sector leadership. It provides insight into the methodologies and techniques used in research, specifically how autoethnography, grounded theory, ethnomethodology, and narrative analysis designs were applied to collect, analyze, and synthesize data to develop a cogent story of how leaders express their spirituality. The research was accomplished in two phases. The results of the first phase suggest that scholars should develop an integrated theory of leadership that includes spirituality as a facilitating and intrinsic dimension of motivation and action. Furthermore, the author argues that spiritual beliefs and manifestations might provide a promising new way to assess mental models of reality at particular stages of human, moral, and leadership development. The second study suggests that although leaders may be able to define spirituality in context of leadership and express ways in which spirituality manifests itself in the workplace, there is little evidence to show that academic programs or workplace developmental programs address the notion of spirituality in a formal or institutionalized manner. The research suggests a leadership development model that facilitates transformational learning experiences through critical and deep reflection and honest discourse about the meaning of spirituality