Is the spiritual bond bound by blood? An exploratory study of spiritual leadership in family firms

Abstract

Our research is one of the first to examine spiritual leadership, which lies at the crossroads of workplace spirituality and transcendental leadership, within the context of family firms. We describe how the unique characteristics of family firms allow for and encompass spiritual leadership. First, we adapt the construct of spiritual leadership to the firm level. Then, analyzing dyadic data, we provide empirical support for the emerging theory of spiritual leadership by linking the spiritual bond between leader and follower to organizational citizenship behavior, a new dependent variable in the nomological net of spiritual leadership. We further explore the relationship in subsets of our data, finding that the relationship holds for family members but does not hold for non-family employees of the family business. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• spiritual leadership
• organizational citizenship behavior
• family firms
• leader–employee dyads
• family–nonfamily employees

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of the Family Owned Business Institute at Grand Valley State University. Both authors received the Family Owned Business Scholar Award in 2012.

Notes

1. For the purpose of this paper, a family firm is defined as “a business governed and/or managed with the intention to shape and pursue the vision of the business held by a dominant coalition controlled by members of the same family or a small number of families in a manner that is potentially sustainable across generations of the family or families” (Chua et al. 1999, p. 25).