Abstract

SIBANDA, Khumbulani  and  GROBLER, Anton. A systematic literature review of spiritual leadership within African management philosophies. Acta Commer. [online]. 2024, vol.24, n.1, pp.1-11. ISSN 1684-1999.  http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ac.v24i1.1164.

ORIENTATION: Spiritual leadership has been proposed as an alternative to lead a generation where personal values and beliefs are central to employee contentment and organisational success. RESEARCH PURPOSE: To critically analyse organisational spiritual leadership (SpL) from an African Management Philosophies (AMP) perspective and whether these are secular or non-secular. MOTIVATION FOR THE STUDY: Knowledge would be drawn from two bodies of scholarly literature, namely SpL and AMP. RESEARCH DESIGN, APPROACH AND METHOD: Literature will be systematically reviewed, focusing on three aspects of the body on knowledge, namely concepts, definitions and typologies (elements). MAIN FINDINGS: The concept of SpL seems empirically much more operationalised than AMP. Central to organisational spiritual leadership are the leader's values, attitudes and behaviours that intrinsically motivate followers to have a sense of spiritual survival through membership and calling, while AMP emphasise traditionalism, communalism, co-operative teamwork and mythologies. PRACTICAL/MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS: The research seeks to highlight the existing gaps in literature of a contextualised African measure of SpL. CONTRIBUTION OR VALUE ADD: A secular and non-secular approach to spirituality emerges, which looks at AMP as emboldened by Ubuntu ideality that is contrary to extant literature on organisational spiritual leadership.

Keywords : spiritual leadership; African management philosophies; leadership models; spiritual; spirituality; African; organisation; employee contentment.

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