This document discusses a eupsychian perspective of spiritual leadership. It summarizes Maslow's concept of "eupsychian management" where organizations aim to help individuals achieve self-actualization. The researchers studied how leadership behaviors can either respect or disrespect employees' workplace spirituality based on critical incidents reported by 105 employees. They found that behaviors like power abuse, disrespect, and cruelty led to negative employee reactions while behaviors promoting self-development, compassion, and community led to increased well-being and commitment. The study provides initial evidence that enlightened leadership can help create more eupsychian and humane organizations.

1. A EUPSYCHIAN PERSPECTIVE
OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
Arménio Rego Miguel Pina e Cunha Miguel Oliveira
Universidade de Aveiro Universidade Nova de Lisboa Universidade do Minho
Portugal

2. Eupsychian Management
“Eupshychian” was coined by A Maslow, in Eupshychian
Management (1965)
It comes from the combination of eu, meaning good (i.e.,
euphoria) and psyche, meaning mind or soul.
Eupshychian means “having a good mind/soul”, “toward a
good mind/soul” or “the well-being of psyche” .
Eupshychia is the society or organization where human
beings naturally strive to become “self-actualizing”.

3. Eupsychian Management
Maslow was mainly excited by the possibility that
employment could provide people with the opportunity
to satisfy their higher order needs for self-esteem and
self-actualization

4. Organizations and HR systems should be designed according
to 36 assumptions that enlightened managers would adopt
Assume (e.g.,)...
•Everyone is to be trusted.
•Everyone can enjoy good teamwork, good group harmony, good belongingness, and group love.
•Everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than
unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, disrespected
•Everyone prefers or perhaps even needs to love his boss (rather than to hate him)…
•All human beings, not only eupsychian ones, prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.
•The preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in contrast to being
anonymous or interchangeable).
•A tendency to identify with more and more of the world, moving toward the ultimate of mysticism,
a fusion with the world, or peak experience, cosmic consciousness, etc.
•We shall have to work out the assumption of the metamotives and the metapathologies, of the
yearning for the “B-values”, i.e., truth, beauty, justice, perfection, and so on.

5. Virtuous circles
Managers’ self-actualization (i.e., enlightened managers) can
produce virtuous circles in organizations, i.e., self-
actualization in other people, since they can satisfy lower
order needs (i.e., physical, safety and social ones).
This, in turn, may lead people to internalize B values (e.g.,
wholeness, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, humor,
completion, playfulness).
This is good for improving employees’ health and well-being, and for the
organization’s performance as well.

6. “Stimuli” for our research
Spirituality is a recent vigorous stream of literature, although
empirical research is still scarce.
Several notions offered in definitions of spirituality (Hicks,
2002) evoke the notion of eupshychian management
(e.g., self-actualization, self-fulfillment, wholeness, harmony,
balance, meaning, vitality, energy, virtue, wisdom, truth,
freedom and interconnectedness).
Few studies relate leadership behaviors with WS.

7. Research
questions

8. 1. What leaders’ behaviors (dis)respect employees’
perceptions of workplace spirituality?
2. How do employees declare to react to these
behaviors?
3. Do employees incorporate religion in their sense of
workplace spirituality?
4. What kind and proportion of positive and negative
leaders’ behaviors do employees report when invited
to narrate events about leaders’ behaviors and their
impacts on workplace spirituality?

9. Method

10. Critical incident technique.
A convenience sample of 105 employees from 53
organizations
Mean age: 32.3 years
Mean contact time between employees & leaders: 4.1 years
68.6% - female
3% - basic education
28% - secondary education
69% - university education

11. Three “moments”
1. Individuals were informed that WS refers to
workplace opportunities to perform meaningful work in
the context of a community with a sense of joy and
respect for inner-life.
2. They were asked to report
two events in which their leaders respected or
disrespected WS.
3. After describing each incident, they were asked to report
how they reacted to the leader’s behavior.

12. 175 useful critical incidents
120 referring to disrespectful behaviors of workplace
spirituality (“anti-eupshychian” events)
55 to respectful behaviors (“eupshychian” events)
Leadership behaviors:
the two researchers reached the same classification in
75% of incidents
Employees’ reactions:
Coefficient of agreement - 80%.
For resolving the divergences: several iterations through e-mail interactions and face-
to-face meetings

13. Findings

14. Effects of eupsychian leadership behaviors
Leadership behaviors Number of Number of times the employee reaction was
The leader: times the mentioned
behavior
was
mentioned
Psychologi- Commit- Positive Sense of
cal well ment and behaviors self-worth
being sense of and (being
calling attitudes appreciated)
toward
supervisor
Promotes self-determination and 25 14 15 1 5
employee personal development.
Respects personal and inner life of 10 5 3 3 2
employees.
Is kind, compassionate, loyal and 8 4 1 3 1
respectful.
Promotes positive interpersonal 7 1 3 3 0
relationships and the sense of team
community.
Is courageous and open-minded. 5 5 1 2 0

15. Effects of anti-eupsychian leadersh. behaviors
Leadership behaviors Number Number of times the employee reaction was mentioned
The leader: of times
Voice, Negative Neglect, Retaliation/ Decrea- Exit Effects Relation-
complai- emotions passivity disobedi- sing role on the ship with
ning and and and ence and team and
upward feelings silence (active extra-role feelings
appeal (passive response) perfor- toward
response) mance the
super-
visor
Power abuses. 62 26 21 9 8 10 2 5 2
Is 19 9 8 3 3 2 2 0 0
ruthless/cruel/unkind
Disrespects personal 17 4 4 7 3 0 2 1 1
and inner life of
employees
Is lazy and coward 13 7 2 2 2 1 0 0 2
Is dishonest and false 9 4 3 1 3 0 1 0 1
Discriminates 8 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1
employees
Instigates bad interp. 5 2 1 1 1 0 1 1 0
Relationships

16. Discussion
and
conclusions

17. The realism of the utopian Eupsychia
• As the POS and WS literatures have shown,
Maslow’s quest for eupsychian organizations
appears to be more realistic that some criticisms
regarding their allegedly utopian aims would
suggest (Payne, 2000).
•Eisler & Montouori (2003) epitomized this
assumption arguing that there is mounting evidence
that a more humane workplace is more productive,
flexible and creative.

18. Prevalence of anti-eupsychian events
Real proportion of eupsychian and anti-eupsychian
events in organizations?
Do some kind of “negative deviance” induces people
to recall and be more sensitive to the negative side of
organizational functioning?
A paradoxical possibility of a “positive deviance?
(assuming that people expect to be well treated,
negative events become more salient in their minds).

19. Limitations and future studies
• Critical incident technique has some drawbacks
and limitations.
• Moderating variables were not considered.
• Sequence of events were not considered.

20. Final comments
Ghoshal & Moran’s (2005) good theory of management,
the interest for Indian philosophies (Engardio, 2006),
and the positive scholarship movement (Cameron et
al., 2004), are recent examples of the “Eupsychian
turn”.
In our research, we suggested that enlightened
managers, as Maslow called them, may contribute
toward creating eupsychian islands, and presented
some practices that distinguish these eupsychian
leaders from their “realist” counterparts.

21. Thank you so
much