Applying critical realism in spirituality at work research

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. Design/methodology/approach: CR is a philosophical meta-theory that allows the stratification of spirituality into different levels of reality, advocates for research methods matching the ontology of the level investigated, and provides complementary methods of exploring this phenomenon's causal power in social contexts. The authors present a study where CR was used to explain how and why SAW influences ethics in organizational contexts. Findings:The results demonstrate that CR provides a useful approach to bridging the positivist-interpretivist difference in SAW research. Moreover, a CR approach helped explain the underlying conditions and causal mechanisms that power SAW to influence ethical decision-making and behavior in the workplace. Originality/value: While CR has been applied in management literature, negligible SAW material has utilized this approach. That which does exist is either conceptual or does not explicitly discuss their methods of data analysis or describe how CR concepts resulted in their findings. This paper addresses that lacuna. CR also provides value, as an alternative approach to SAW research, in that it allows the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods as complementary, not confrontational, approaches to the study of SAW while providing a more integrated and deeper view of SAW and its effects. Opposing this view are those that argue for interpretivist approaches (Lips-Wiersma, 2003, Neal et al., 1999. For instance, Fornaciari and Dean (2001) argue that scientific knowledge is a partial truth, a truth that ignores inner meaning. They "challenge the dominance of the positivist paradigm in spirituality in organizations research, pointing out the absurdity of trying to factor analyse God" (p. 35).Unfortunately, SAW is not easy to classify and can be problematic to measure. How we express spirituality tends to be value-laden and inherently personal. Unfortunately, human beings are complex non-rational and emotional creatures who tend to defy the neat, behaviourist definitions offered by the positivist model. As Lips-Wiersma (2003) argues, not only is one's expression of spirituality intensely unique to each individual, any inquiry into its nature or effe...

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