Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning

(Hardback)

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This text explains why values-based spiritual leadership that coalesces employees into a harmonious group is the only way to successfully manage increasingly diverse workers in the 21st century. A person's values are the most powerful factor defining his or her actions; everyone has a value system or a spiritual component that triggers their behavior. Our personal values are a more powerful force upon individual action than corporate policy, procedures, tradition or peer pressure. Since the work environment is where the typical worker will spend the most timemore than at home with family, with friends, or at churchit is reasonable that workers will have spiritual demands as well as economic needs from their work lives. Unfortunately, this is a task managers are not prepared to meet. Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning argues that values-basedi.e., spiritualleadership is the only way to do leadership in today's globalized, multi-differentiated world. The author traces the development of real leadership through five generations of theory, then builds a strong case for the values leadership strategy because of its ability to unify workers and because it allows them to find personal meaning in the workplace task at hand.

Author Bio

Gilbert W. Fairholm is emeritus professor of management at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.