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Top1. Introduction
The growing community spiritual awareness in work sectors influenced top executives, middle managers, and ordinary employees to seek out work spirituality. They attempted to express it in various forms. One of the concrete proofs that the community is “seeking out” spirituality can be observed from the rise of sales of religious and spiritual books compared to other categories (Aburdene, 2007).
Another aspect causing the community to turn into spiritualism is the presence of a problem or a period of increasing uncertainty and complexity. The repeated economic recessions, rising unemployment, employees’ layoffs, and financial losses strengthened spirituality seekers. According to Aburdene (2007), religion and spirituality are taboo in American companies. However, many employees are looking for meaning in their workplaces and business leaders are looking for approaches that socially responsible business. They are looking for new ways to motivate and inspire employees. Many companies are pushing for the development of the new trend because they believe that a humanistic work environment creates a win-win situation for employees and organizations. If the members of the organization are happy, they will be more productive, creative, and satisfied. There are various ways to express a longing for spirituality. There are those who participate in meditation and yoga. Executives become activists of religious rituals such as Tasawuf, Sufism, and the new age.
When many individuals develop their spirit, similar manner occurs to the organizations. It takes longer to absorb spirituality at the organizational level. However, enlightened individuals are able to change their organization. If in the 1990s, spiritual awareness was generally triggered at the individual level, then in the 2000s they began to translate spirituality into organizations. In other words, the transformation that was at the personal level spread to an institutional level. The search for spirituality is the current megatrend (Aburdene, 2007). Enthusiasm is seen in the number of seminars, training, and workshops related to spirituality both domestic and abroad. Mark Moody, a senior leader of one of the world's largest oil companies, Shell, called for a spiritualist to provide spiritual training to 550 company executives (Naisbit and Aburdene, 1990). The strengthening of the spirituality paradigm is affecting various business organizations and public organizations in Indonesia. These organizations strive to improve their human resources and performance by equipping employees with various kinds of spiritual motivation training. For example, through Qolbu Management training (MQ), Emotional-spiritual Quotient-ESQ training (Agustian, 2001), TCM Celestial Management Training (Amin, 2009), or Corporate Spiritual Training-CST, (Saleh Akh. M., 2009).
Lagace et al. (2002) stated that during the past decade, spirituality has become a concern in the business or corporate sector. The Harvard Business School (HBS) conducted a leadership seminar entitled ‘Does Spirituality Drive Success?’. The participants discussed how spirituality values helped them to become powerful leaders. From the two-day discussion, the company officials agreed that spirituality was able to produce five things, namely: integrity or honesty; energy or enthusiasm; inspiration or ideas and initiatives; wisdom; courage in making decisions. In short, they agreed that spirituality proved to be able to encourage success.