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Leaders often find themselves encumbered by many challenges. Because of these hurdles, leaders may lose sight of their holistic wellbeing. Wellbeing is a combination of the quality and cumulative effects of work, life, health, relationships, and community. Leaders with higher levels of wellbeing are likely to be more effective, productive, and foster quality relationships with followers. This practice paper details a guided meditation methodology that creates a safe space for leaders to remove mental distractions, reflect on their current state of wellbeing, and develop increased levels of self-awareness. Results to date indicate learners have responded positively to the guided meditation process and have sustained the practice of introspection. Recommendations and implications are discussed.

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on “The leading edge in research on spirituality and organizations”. The paper discusses some of the issues concerning the outer world of worldly activities and the inner world of spirituality and religion in modern Western society, with particular emphasis on how this affects organizations. The aims of the special issue are put forward and the papers within it are briefly discussed.

Higher education around the world appears to be at the beginning of a period of major transformation, with new roles, demands, and responsibilities. Administrators need new understanding, tools, and approaches for managing such a transformation. This paper describes a general framework for strategic planning that academic institutions can use in their efforts to engage in such a transformation. The framework includes many of the newest tools and approaches in management.

The purpose of this paper is to review the implementation of two strategies that are actually un-teachable yet highly effective in higher education: meditation and storytelling.

Specifically focussing on workplace spirituality as a movement from corporate workers, and consequently, also a teaching topic in management education, the paper first indicates some problems faced in today's world, and relates these to the need for facilitating college courses in more compelling and comprehensive ways.

Spirituality and spiritual concepts can involve emotional and other non-cognitive experiences which cannot be taught using traditional teaching approaches such as reading and lecture. Specific approaches, such as meditation and storytelling are useful for teaching spirituality and spiritual concepts in a business school classroom setting. These two strategies provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their experiences and to become more self-aware.

Using the practical strategies discussed in this paper in management classes turns out to be a positive experience for both the course facilitators and the students.

Reflecting on the overhaul attempts of management education in universities, even those with the prestige of Harvard and Stanford, the authors discuss some interesting strategies that can help management educators take their course experiences and the results attained to the next level.

The 1899 book and the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz hold a permanent influence on US culture. In this article we describe how the Wizard of Oz’s story can serve as a metaphor for balancing energies and organizational transformation at all levels. Just as the spiritual transformation of a person must be initiated from within, so organizations must discover the inner power to balance energies and transform themselves into more humane systems.

This paper introduces the second issue of the special issue on research issues and research findings in spirituality in organizations. The first issue explored issues of definition and methodology, and included empirical research studies (published as Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, 2003). This second issue continues and deepens that exploration, with further refinement of definitions, interdisciplinary approaches to methodology and the selection of constructs, and reports on quantitative and qualitative studies. This introduction contains an overview of the aims and themes of this special issue, summarizes the state of play in the field of organizational research and provides synopses of the papers presented.

Contends that predictions of the end of work as we know it, and a bleak jobless future, as we head into the twenty‐first century, derive from a modernist paradigm of work ‐ a paradigm that has been the prevailing paradigm for the past 100 years. Seeks to provide a more hopeful and humane paradigm for the future of work ‐ a model based on spiritual guidelines and principles. Describes characteristics of each paradigm and then contrasts them on both the individual manager and organization levels. Explores how these principles could be applied to produce power in organizational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare various theoretical models of decision making such as classical rational decision making, left‐brain/right‐brain dominance decision making, utilization of tacit knowledge in decision making, utilization of intuition in decision making, utilization of emotional intelligence in decision making, a systems approach to decision making, and spirit‐based decision making.

Studies on different modalities of decision making are reviewed, discussed, and compared.

The traditional assumption of the optimality of rational decision making may be improved by including other dimensions of decision making. It is posited that organizations that encourage and support multi‐dimensional decision making, which utilizes the rational, intuitional, emotional and spiritual aspects of the whole person, develop better management–employee relations, more creative problem solving, and better market place performance.

Development and testing of instruments that measure multi‐dimensional decision making would extend the scope of this study.

This paper compares different styles of decision making to assist the manager in making optimal decisions. By expanding on the traditional rational decision making model to include other dimensions of decision‐making, managers are able to capture additional information in framing their decisions.

Despite a reluctance on the part of organizational researchers to deal with the subjects of emotions or spirituality, recent researchers have begun to argue for the importance of exploring their relationship to workplace performance. Recent research, for example, has shown a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and workplace success. Similarly, it appears that spirituality is related to workplace performance or effectiveness. This paper explores the impacts of emotional intelligence and spirituality on workplace effectiveness, presents several theoretical models examining possible linkages among these variables, and, finally, presents several ideas for future research deriving from the models.