Does Spiritual Awareness Foster Managerial Values? - A Quizzical Survey Conducted on a Group of MBA Final Year Students in Botswana

Abstract

In this paper the authors review various modern theories of Leadership and Management and observe that there are diverse views in Leadership theories while Management theory broadly remaining the same. All these theories are secular in their character, originating mostly in the west where material dimension is predominant. The Role of Spiritual connectedness and Consciousness in Leadership and Management is not to be found in these theories, though some ethical elements such as transparency, fairness and Corporate Social Responsibility find place in these theories. While accepting the fact that material dimension is important for material progress of humanity, the authors express the view that spiritual dimension is not to be ignored. Spiritual awareness and conscious practice of spirituality promotes and fosters values in all human beings in general and in particular, a valuable asset for Leaders and Managers. To verify this view, a Two-Quiz survey was designed and conducted on a group of 48 MBA final year students in the Faculty of Business, University of Botswana. The first quiz was to assess the spiritual awareness and the second Quiz was to assess Values in management. The numerical scores of spiritual awareness and Management values were analysed on a scatter plot with spiritual awareness as base, which indicated that the group as a whole showed a tendency of positive coefficient of correlation between these two variables. The results support the view of the authors who recommend that Spiritual Foundation with conscious spiritual practices is a factor to be considered in leadership and management training and development. A universal theory of leadership with spiritual foundation is presented in the concluding part of the paper.