Religion in a Changing Workplace

Abstract

This book summarizes the culmination of five years of research on faith at work in the United States, featuring insights generated from a survey of over fifteen thousand adults and three hundred in-depth interviews. The authors make the case for the thoughtful inclusion of religious identities in the workplace and argue that employers should accommodate religious self-expression at work. While many companies are increasingly recognizing and embracing the business value of employees bringing their whole selves to work, there is some uncertainty about how to respond to workers’ religious and spiritual identities, and a fear that such expression will lead to workplace conflict. This book provides scholarly evidence to help companies understand and develop ways to respond to the presence of religion in the workplace in a thoughtful way. This data-driven yet accessible approach helps organizational leaders, workers, and scholars understand both the challenges and benefits of the integration of faith at places and spaces of employment. By looking at how workers from a variety of religious traditions and social groups are bringing their faith into the workplace, the authors identify why and how organizations can engage diversity of religious belief and expression in the workplace. Until now, there has been little broad information for organizational leaders on how a wide range of workers understand their work vis-à-vis their faith, and how religious identities and practices overlap with and may be key to fostering other kinds of workplace diversity, like gender, sexuality, and racial diversity.