Embracing Spiritual Followership

Abstract

While academics and organizational practitioners consider secular leadership as the locus of vision construction, moral direction, meaning making, and mobilization of human resources, the ways in which followers construct identities, relationships, discourses, and practices that support, challenge, and transform leader-follower relationships and organizing processes and outcomes remain unaddressed. Problematic dualisms between leaders and followers and secularity and spirituality persist in organizational research and practice. In this article, we examine the communicative meanings, practices, and dangers of spiritual followership through interpretive, functional, and critical lenses. Enacting spiritual followership renews meaning, purpose, connectedness, and integration for self, leaders, organization, and community. We suggest some avenues of inquiry at multiple levels of analysis and from varied epistemological and methodological approaches.

Keywords:

• Followership
• Leadership
• Organizational Communication
• Responsibility
• Spirituality

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association, at the 2004 convention in Chicago. The authors would like to thank Patrice Buzzanell for her leadership in the germination of the ideas presented in this manuscript, her followership in supporting subsequent revisions and reformulations, and her excellent suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. The authors also thank Kevin Barge for his substantive and lively feedback, Robert Smith for his timely and sage advice on the publishing process, and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed, very constructive, and insightful recommendations.

Notes

Spirituality can inform the problematics of voice, rationality, organization, and organization-society (Mumby & Stohl, 1996) because its meanings are diverse, yet essentially integrative. Spirituality can also challenge these problematics by calling into question dominant organizing processes, practices, voices, values, and rationalities.

Spiritual followership differs from connective leadership (Lipman-Blumen, 1997) in important ways. Connective leadership is leader, not follower, focused. Also, connective leadership is stimulated by conditions of globalization whereas spiritual followership originates with individuals' relational and discursive practices.

Critical theory derives from Marxism as well as the Frankfurt School that stresses that knowledge is historical leading to biased communication. In organizational contexts, claims to “objective” knowledge often perpetuate managerialism and the corporate colonization of everyday life (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996; Mumby, 1997a 1997b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Frye

Joshua Frye is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY College at Oneonta. Lorraine G. Kisselburgh and David Butts are Doctoral Candidates in the Department of Communication at Purdue University.