Exploring individuals' workplace spirituality in the context of their work teams: A qualitative multi-case, multi-team study

Spirituality has been associated with a person's desire to perform meaningful work and to feel connected with the community that is being served through this work. Since most adults spend a large amount of their productive hours at work pursuing meaning and purpose in their jobs, the concept of workplace spirituality (WS) has gained considerable attention. The nature of work has also increasingly shifted to the use of teams of expert talent to solve complex problems, thus calls for further research on team member behaviors that effect team productivity and team member motivation have been made. With the prevalence of work teams, a better understanding of individuals' WS in work teams is needed, yet, limited empirical research has been conducted on this topic. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to better understand how individuals express and experience WS within their work teams and how their WS influences their work teams. A qualitative multi-case, multi-team design was employed using face-to-face, semi-structured individual interviews, collective work team interviews, observations, and field notes as the primary approaches to data collection. Data analyzed in this study using thematic analysis included 19 individual team member interviews, and six collective team interviews representing a total of six teams across two organizations. The findings and contributions of this study are presented, along with a future research agenda.