18494: Differentiating Spiritual vs. Religious Practices and Exploring Workplace Outcomes Among Professors (session 26368)

Research focusing on spiritual and religious practices has grown significantly over the past few decades, highlighting benefits to the employee and organization. However, research has suffered from bias toward activities not universal to all religions. In addition, many studies do not clearly differentiate between spiritual practices versus religious practices. First, we review the literature regarding the workplace benefits of spiritual and religious practices. Second, we summarize the manner in which spiritual and religious practices have been discussed in the literature, illustrating how research has suffered from a blurring of the lines between the two. Next, based on qualitative insights (Study 1) and our review of the literature, we create a measure to differentiate spiritual versus religious practices. Study 2 includes a pilot study of working adults to validate the new items, followed by an 8-week experience sampling study of business professors showing that spiritual and religious practices are differently related to weekly citizenship and performance behaviors. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the proposed measure, as well as implications for future research.

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