Human Resource Management is arguably the most measured function in the modern organisation. We track engagement scores, attrition curves, cost-per-hire, learning hours, span of control, nine-box grids. And yet, walk into almost any HR conversation in 2026 and you will hear a quieter set of questions that no dashboard has a column for: Why do people who tick every box still leave? Why does a well-designed job feel empty? What exactly are we asking people to give their working lives to?
These are, at root, spiritual questions. Not religious ones spiritual ones. And HRM is slowly, awkwardly, learning to ask them out loud. This growing interest in workplace spirituality, spirituality in HRM, and spirituality in human resource management reflects a broader recognition that employees bring more than skills and competencies to work.
The idea of spirituality at work is increasingly connected with meaningful work, employee purpose, wellbeing, and the quality of relationships within organisations.
First, a definition- because the word carries baggage
Workplace spirituality is not about installing a prayer room and calling it culture work. In the management literature, it has a reasonably precise meaning. Ashmos and Duchon’s foundational work framed it as the recognition that employees have an inner life that is nourished by meaningful work in the context of community. Milliman and colleagues later operationalised it along three levels that have since become the standard scaffolding:
Meaningful work (individual level) — does what I do connect to something I actually value?
Sense of community (group level) — am I among people, or merely among colleagues?
Alignment with organisational values (organisational level) — does the enterprise stand for something I can stand behind?
Notice what is absent: doctrine, deity, ritual, denomination. Giacalone and Jurkiewicz drew this line firmly spirituality in organisations concerns transcendence and interconnectedness in the experience of work, not the importation of any particular faith tradition into the office. Mitroff and Denton’s well-known survey found executives were remarkably comfortable discussing spirituality and remarkably uncomfortable discussing religion.
That distinction is the whole ballgame, and HR gets into trouble precisely when it blurs it. Understanding spirituality versus religion in the workplace is therefore essential when organisations discuss workplace spirituality.
Why is the question surfacing now?
Three pressures have converged.
The meaning deficit
Burnout, disengagement, and what the popular press labelled quiet quitting are usually diagnosed as workload problems. Often they are not. A person can be underworked and still hollowed out. The engagement constructs itself vigour, dedication, absorption smuggles in something close to a spiritual claim: that good work involves the self, not just the skillset.
This is where spirituality and employee engagement become closely connected. Employees increasingly want meaningful work and a sense that their contribution matters. This is also one reason organisations are paying greater attention to the importance of workplace spirituality and its possible relationship with employee wellbeing.
Automation and the redefinition of contribution
As AI absorbs an expanding share of routine cognitive work, the residual human contribution shifts toward judgement, care, ethical discernment, and relationship. These are not competencies you can bolt on through a two-day workshop. They grow out of a person’s inner orientation to their work.
HR functions that have spent a decade building capability frameworks are discovering that the most valuable remaining capabilities are the ones frameworks handle worst.
The relationship between AI and human resource management makes this question even more important. As technology changes the nature of work, human-centric HRM will need to consider not only productivity and capability but also meaning, purpose, ethics, and human connection.
Demographic honesty
Younger cohorts entering the workforce are, by most survey evidence, less institutionally religious and simultaneously more insistent that work mean something. They will not accept purpose as a poster. They will interrogate it.
This creates a stronger case for the purpose-driven workplace, where employee purpose and organisational purpose are connected in a meaningful rather than merely promotional way.
What the evidence actually supports and what it doesn’t
Here the researcher in me needs to be careful, because this field has an enthusiasm problem.
The empirical work does show reasonably consistent positive associations between workplace spirituality and outcomes including organisational commitment, job satisfaction, organisational citizenship behaviour, and reduced turnover intention. Meta-analytic and multistudy evidence points the same direction. That much is fair to claim.
These findings are part of the discussion around workplace spirituality benefits, particularly its possible relationship with spirituality and job satisfaction, employee engagement, commitment, and wellbeing.
What is not well established is causal direction and mechanism. Most studies are cross-sectional, self-reported, single-source, and vulnerable to common method bias. It is entirely plausible that satisfied, committed employees report higher perceived spirituality rather than the reverse. The measurement instruments — many adapted from Milliman’s scales — capture perceptions of meaning and community, which overlap conceptually with the very outcomes they predict. Discriminant validity is a live concern.
So the honest position is this: workplace spirituality is a construct with real explanatory value and a research base that still needs longitudinal and experimental designs before we speak about it in the language of levers and returns.
The Indic contribution which is substantial and underused
Anglo-American management scholarship arrived at workplace spirituality in the 1990s. Indian intellectual traditions have been working the same terrain for rather longer, and with sharper tools. Three ideas deserve a place in mainstream HRM thinking.
Nishkama Karma (the Bhagavad Gita)
The instruction to act with full commitment to the action while releasing attachment to its fruits is not a counsel of indifference it is a remarkably precise psychological technology for sustaining effort under uncertainty.
Consider what it implies for performance management: a system that ties self-worth exclusively to outcome metrics manufactures anxiety in every employee whose outcomes depend on factors outside their control, which is most of them.
Nishkama Karma in the workplace suggests evaluating quality of engagement alongside quality of result. Some appraisal systems already do this badly. The philosophy suggests doing it deliberately.
This connection between the Bhagavad Gita and HRM provides an important example of how Indian philosophy and HRM can engage with contemporary questions about performance, purpose, motivation, and employee wellbeing.
Kirat karo and vand chhako (Sikh tradition)
Honest labour and the sharing of its fruits form an ethic in which dignified work and distributive fairness are inseparable; you cannot claim one while violating the other.
Applied to HR, this reframes compensation equity and gig-worker treatment not as compliance matters but as questions of whether the work itself remains honest. The associated principle of sarbat da bhala welfare of all sets the boundary of the stakeholder group considerably wider than the shareholder register.
These ideas demonstrate how Sikh principles and management can contribute to discussions around fairness, dignity, responsibility, and values in organisations.
Yogakshema (Kautilya’s Arthashastra)
Kautilya’s formulation that the ruler’s welfare lies in the welfare of the subjects, and that the ruler’s good is what pleases them rather than what pleases the ruler, is one of the earliest explicit statements of what we would now call stewardship leadership.
The Arthashastra is also refreshingly unsentimental it pairs this ethic with detailed administrative machinery, audit, and accountability. It does not ask you to choose between conscience and control systems.
The connection between Kautilya’s Arthashastra and management offers another example of how Indian intellectual traditions can contribute to modern discussions of ethical leadership and organisational governance.
The methodological caution matters here too: these frameworks should be engaged as living intellectual traditions with internal debate and interpretive difficulty, not mined for decorative quotations to garnish a Western model. The lazy version of this work Sanskrit epigraph, then standard competency framework helps no one.
What it looks like in practice?
If a function wanted to take this seriously rather than performatively:
Job design before wellness programmes
Meaningfulness is largely produced by task significance, autonomy, and visible impact classic job characteristics territory. A meditation app cannot compensate for a job stripped of all three.
This is central to the role of spirituality in HRM because meaningful work cannot simply be added through wellness programmes. It needs to be reflected in how work itself is designed.
Selection and socialisation for values, honestly disclosed
Alignment requires that the organisation state what it actually stands for, including its trade-offs, so candidates can genuinely opt in or out.
This supports values-based HRM, where organisational values are reflected in actual policies and behaviours rather than simply displayed in corporate communication.
Managerial capability in holding difficult conversations
Community at work is built or destroyed in ordinary interactions how a mistake is handled, whether grief is acknowledged, whether disagreement is safe.
Creating a genuine sense of community at work therefore depends heavily on managers and everyday organisational behaviour.
Structural fairness as a spiritual matter
Pay equity, transparent promotion, and grievance systems that work are not adjacent to this agenda. They are the substance of it.
A workplace cannot convincingly promote employee purpose and wellbeing while ignoring fairness, dignity, and ethical treatment.
Voluntariness, always
Any practice an employee cannot decline without cost has ceased to be spiritual and become coercive.
This principle is especially important when considering spirituality at work in diverse organisations. Participation in spiritual or reflective practices should remain voluntary and inclusive.
The critique that must be taken seriously
There is a legitimate objection, and it should not be waved away.
The instrumentalisation of spirituality deploying meaning as a productivity lever, or as a substitute for adequate pay, staffing, and rest is a genuine risk, and critical scholars have documented it.
When an organisation asks people to find transcendence in work while declining to fund the work properly, that is not spiritual leadership. It is extraction with better vocabulary.
There is also the pluralism problem. In a workforce spanning many faiths and none, the line between a shared language of meaning and the soft imposition of a majority worldview is thin and easily crossed, often by people with good intentions.
In the Indian context specifically, where constitutional secularism coexists with deep religious diversity, HR practitioners need real care in how these frameworks are introduced as offered resources, never as expected commitments.
The Future of HRM: From Spirituality to Human-Centric HRM
The strongest case for taking spirituality seriously in HRM is not that it improves retention, though it may. It is that the alternative treating people as bundles of competencies to be optimised is empirically inadequate.
Human beings persistently behave as though their work should mean something, and any model of HRM that cannot accommodate this is describing a workforce that does not exist.
This is why the future of HRM is likely to involve a stronger focus on purpose, meaning, values, relationships, ethics, and human wellbeing alongside traditional performance measures.
The task ahead is not to make workplaces spiritual.
It is to stop designing them as though the question never arises.
The real opportunity is to develop a human-centric approach to HRM in which meaningful work, employee purpose, organisational commitment, ethical leadership, and employee wellbeing are taken seriously without turning spirituality into another productivity metric.