Boosting Human Capital via Spiritual Leadership: An Exmaple From Turkey

Introduction

In modern business life, owing to the increasing competition, it has become very difficult for organizations to gain superiority among each other. As a result of increasing intellectual and technological developments in recent times, societies whose economy is based on agriculture have been replaced by industrial societies and industrial societies have started a change and transformation in the definition of leadership (Narcıkara, 2017). The changing management needs and the hunger of human nature for spirituality have increased the importance of spiritual leadership, which is known as the spiritual leadership style and which is a new leadership model that opens up a space for spirituality in the business environment. There is evidence that workplace spirituality programs not only lead to beneficial personal outcomes such as increased positive health and psychological well-being, but also improved employee engagement, productivity, and reduced absenteeism and turnover. Companies perform better if they emphasize workplace spirituality through both people-centered values and a model of high engagement between the company and its employees. Moreover, there is growing evidence that a more spiritual workplace is not only more productive, but also more flexible and creative, as well as a sustainable source of competitive advantage (Fry et al., 2017). Moreover, as unethical practices have emerged and now prevail in the modern workplace, organiza- tions have started to desire for alternative leadership approaches (Oh and Wang, 2020) and as a promising approach, value-based leadership as in the case with spiritual leadership (Copeland 2014) has gained importance.

On the one hand, Bozbura and Toraman (2010) state that as a result of recent studies, the human presence used while explaining the intangible assets of organizations has shown that human capital has a positive effect on market value of organizations. Although human capital is a component of intellectual capital, it is seen as the most valuable asset among tangible assets. In this study, the possible positive effect that spiritual leadership can have on human capital in businesses is examined.

In the first part of the study, the concept of leadership, leadership history, leadership types/styles, leadership traits theory, behavior leadership theory, contingency theory in leadership are explained. In the second part of the study, spiritual leadership theory, the concept of spirituality, workplace spirituality, spiritual leadership, spiritual leadership models, dimensions of spiritual leadership are explained. In the third part of the study, the concept of human capital, the concept of intellectual capital, the development of the concept of intellectual capital, its conceptual dimension and the elements of human capital and intellectual capital are explained. In the fourth part of the study, the methodology of the study is given. In the related field research, google forms questionnaire was used as a measurement tool. As a result of the analysis conducted in this study, it has been revealed that spiritual leadership has a positive effect on human capital of individuals working in Turkish companies.