Linking spirituality and values to personal initiative through psychological empowerment

Abstract

To answer calls by organizational scholars for empirical works examining the important individual and contextual antecedents of personal initiative, we develop and test a model in which spirituality and alignment with organizational spiritual values result in greater personal initiative ratings by supervisors through the mediating effects of psychological empowerment. Results from supervisor–subordinate dyadic data (N = 150) obtained from employed MBA students indicated that psychological empowerment partially mediates the influence of spirituality on personal initiative and fully mediates the relationship between organizational spiritual values alignment and personal initiative. These results suggest that spirituality and organizational spiritual values alignment represent key antecedents of personal initiative and that psychological empowerment is an important intermediary of these links. Implications are discussed.

Keywords:

• spirituality
• psychological empowerment
• values
• personal initiative

Notes

1. It is important to note that spirituality and religion are not the same entity; rather, they are two related, but distinct constructs. While spirituality and religion are commonly thought of as synonymous, researchers have acknowledged the differences between the two (Henningsgaard and Arnau 2008).

2. Error variances were allowed to covary for the parcels referring to spirituality and psychological empowerment.