Column: God goes to the office

Feb 8, 2010 — USA Today

God goes to the office

More businesses are embracing or encouraging spirituality in the workplace, but before you sing Hallelujah, look a little closer at the motives behind the trend.

By Lake Lambert III

Jesus instructed his followers not to serve both God and mammon. Buddha taught his followers to abandon all earthly attachments. But in the past few years, a new workplace spirituality movement has proclaimed the exact opposite and seeks to transform capitalism away from narrow materialism. Many wonder whether it will work, but the better question is whether we want our work to be holistic and all-consuming.

According to the workplace spirituality movement, creativity at work is a spiritual process that involves the whole person and not just the intellect or manual skill, and the new class of knowledge workers is devoting more of their time to work because they find deep meaning and a sense of purpose on the job. Today, clergy from various traditions serve as corporate chaplains, and the new faces of spiritual leadership are organizational development consultants who lead employees through creativity-enhancing spiritual practices. Overall, the contemporary workplace is regarded as a community, open to spirituality in the same way that it is hospitable to friendship and love.

A small but significant number of companies make a spiritual connection specifically to the Christian tradition, and owners of these organizations tend to be evangelicals. When founder Truett Cathy faced a business crisis at Chick-fil-A, now a growing fast-food enterprise, he made glorifying God one of the corporation's goals. At Chick-fil-A's corporate headquarters in Atlanta, company meetings sometimes include prayer. Cathy also requires that all his stores be closed on Sunday.

At the local Wal-Mart, books like Jesus, CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership promote Jesus as a teacher of business management techniques, but Christ is not alone. What Would Buddha Do at Work?, Moses on Management, and The Wisdom of Solomon at Work have joined Jesus, CEO and books like The 25 Most Common Problems in Business: (and How Jesus Solved Them) on the bookstore shelf.

Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager, hosted a series of seminars to inspire managers to "lead like Jesus." Surprisingly, mass media have brought together evangelical Christians and New Age devotees in a way no ecumenical dialogue could ever imagine. Workplace spirituality books are successful because they appeal to both self-identified religious believers and others who seek guidance from great teachers of wisdom.

God's (business) plan

As workplace spirituality has gained prominence in corporate offices, business faculty have taken notice. Spirituality has become part of the business curricula at many colleges and universities. Courses now have titles such as "Spirituality of Work," "The Business World: Moral and Spiritual Inquiry through Literature", and "Creative and Personal Mastery." Or they may have normal sounding titles, but their syllabi reveal something different, as with the entrepreneurship class described as "harnessing Nature's infinite creativity to plan and start a small business." Business professors are also organizing to discuss their interest and research on workplace spirituality, including a new group within the Academy of Management.

What unites advocates of spirituality in business is their desire to change the very values that drive enterprise, but they do so with a Gandhian sense that the only way to bring about a true and lasting change in action and behavior is to bring about a spiritual transformation.

However, most current interest in business spirituality is not connected to specific religious traditions, and some proponents of workplace spirituality are actually hostile to religion and what they think it represents. They seek to tap instead what is understood to be the spiritual core present in all people, and so they intentionally use a vague definition of spirituality. It has a strong focus on values and ethics, but there is also a desire to go deeper, and this depth is understood to be spiritual.

This may sound good on the surface, but it easily turns spirituality into a corporate benefit - like good life insurance or a fitness center. A sense of transcendence is necessary for spirituality and religion to possess prophetic dimensions, and intentionally or unintentionally, spirituality in business may become a means to manipulate or control workers.

Certainly, the drive for holism encourages workers to feel at home in the work environment and may even encourage workers to regard fellow employees as family, but spirituality can be an abusive tool to keep employees in line and discourage dissent. After all, the company and the team environment are seen as a sacred space and relationship. More important, spirituality cannot maintain its own dignity and autonomy if it is subordinated to the economic laws of supply and demand.

Pushing the faith

Religious pluralism raises additional issues. Employees may feel awkward or coerced by forms of corporate spirituality that challenge or undermine their own belief system. A Jew will obviously feel uncomfortable if not offended in a business meeting at Chick-fil-A that is opened in prayer to Jesus Christ, and many Christians would feel equally awkward in a business meeting that invoked a spirit that was not named as the God of the Apostles Creed. Authentic practitioners of Native American or Eastern religious tradition may object to the commercialization of their deeply held convictions. Charges of religious discrimination in the workplace have exploded in the past decade, rising faster than any other form of discrimination complaint. More litigation could be in store as additional companies seek to motivate and surround employees with an eclectic collection of spiritual resources even as they struggle to be hospitable to the increasingly diverse religious practices of new immigrants.

Of course, a careful distinction should be made between spiritual practices encouraged by the corporation itself and spiritual practices initiated by workers and allowed by employers. Many companies provide space for lunch-hour Bible studies, allow prayer groups, or accommodate the religious or spiritual practices of employees (including holidays and dress). Corporations can welcome spirituality and religious expression as a means to honor the ethics, integrity and deep religious convictions of employees, but this need not include fostering new forms of spirituality in pursuit of holistic business goals.

Let businesses do their job, and let Jesus and the Buddha do theirs.

Lake Lambert III is Board of Regents Professor in Ethics at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, and the author of Spirituality, Inc: Religion in the American Workplace.

At work

Examples of spiritual outreach, and the consequences, across the USA:

'?¢ Hobby Lobby is a major retail outlet for crafts and home decorations. Founder David Green manages the company based on the Bible, including being closed on Sunday.

'?¢ Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, teaches managers how to use transcendental meditation for business success.

'?¢ Jesus, CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership is an international best-seller and has been translated into 12 languages.

'?¢ The predominately Jewish Diamond Dealers Club in New York hosts regular Torah and Talmud study.

Tyson Foods employs its own chaplains, but other companies contract out for chaplaincy services with Marketplace Chaplains USA or Corporate Chaplains of America.

'?¢ Religious discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased 87% from 1999 through 2009.

By Lake Lambert III

(Illustration by Web Bryant, USA TODAY.)