Effect of Spirituality on Human Performance - A Myth or Reality?

Abstract

There are many researches conducted in the area of factors influencing human performance in various industries. Many improvement projects using lean and six sigma techniques have been applied in the past to overcome the problem of human errors. Factors can be broadly classified into Individual and Organisational. The topic of human performance has been heavily researched in industries such as Nuclear, Aviation, Healthcare etc...Studies have been conducted depending upon the type of tasks considering Physical Quotient, Intelligent Quotient and Emotional Quotient. However, the effect of human task performance as a result of Spiritual Quotient is a very unique study and first of its kind. This paper aims to test if the ultimate knowledge of spiritual intelligence has any influence on the human performance. A controlled experiment was conducted. The dependent variable is Accuracy of the transaction processed with independent factors as Gender and Spiritual Intelligence. It was a 22 experiment, i.e. 2 factors (Gender and SQ) and 2 levels (male/female and high/low). 63 MBA students (41 males and 22 females) of a Business School were involved in this experiment. They were asked to fill up a 24 items questionnaire on Spiritual Intelligence. Later they were asked to perform a task to understand their performance. The task involved reading a passage and entering data both numeric and alphabetic into a standard template.The participants were given sufficient time as per the industrial standards just to simulate the work environment pressure. There were 59 fields of data entry and the performance was calculated by measuring the accuracy of data entry. That is, the ratio of number of fields entered correctly to the total number of fields to be entered. (defects per opportunity). The results show that human performance is significantly related to Spiritual Intelligence irrespective of the Gender.