An Investigation on the Relationship between Spirituality in Workplace and Organizational Commitment (A Case Study of the Employees of Public Organizations in Kerman)

Nowadays, most of the employees feel disappointed and disenchanted with their careers due to the organizational downsizing, reengineering and staff layoff in recent decades. These employees seek meaningful and purposeful jobs and an environment conductive to nurturing their talents and creativity for developing. Therefore, the emergence of spirituality in organizational studies, whether in the framework of western instrumental rationality or beyond that, is inevitable. Another challenge facing today’s organizations is employees’ organizational commitment and their motivational issues. Annually, these organizations spend considerable expense on recruiting, hiring, and even training expert staff which is considered as the human capital and the most important capital of the organization. The main aim of the present study is to investigate the correlation between workplace spirituality and organizational commitment of the public organizations employees in Kerman. The statistical population includes all the employees working at the public organizations in Kerman (1,915 individuals). According to the size of the population a total number of 310 individuals were, ultimately, selected using stratified random sampling method and Cochran formula. Two questionnaires of workplace spirituality and organizational commitment were applied and their validity and reliability were measured. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS and employing descriptive statistics methods (mean, median, frequency tables, and different diagrams) as well as inferential statistics (Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation coefficients, regression and partial correlation). The results revealed a significant relationship between workplace spirituality and organizational commitment. More accurate investigations show that there is a significant relationship between the components of workplace spirituality (feelings of connectedness, alignment with the values and meaningfulness in workplace) and those of organizational commitment (affective commitment, normative commitment, and continuance commitment), indicating that workplace spirituality is among the important factors for improving organizational commitment.