Abstract

While academics and organizational practitioners consider secular leadership as the locus of vision construction, moral direction, meaning making, and mobilization of human resources, the ways in which followers construct identities, relationships, discourses, and practices that support, challenge, and transform leader-follower relationships and organizing processes and outcomes remain unaddressed. Problematic dualisms between leaders and followers and secularity and spirituality persist in organizational research and practice. In this article, we examine the communicative meanings, practices, and dangers of spiritual followership through interpretive, functional, and critical lenses. Enacting spiritual followership renews meaning, purpose, connectedness, and integration for self, leaders, organization, and community. We suggest some avenues of inquiry at multiple levels of analysis and from varied epistemological and methodological approaches.

Keywords: followership; leadership; organizational communication; responsibility; spirituality