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Keywords Religion, Work psychology, Measurement
Abstract After a history of mostly ambivalence and neglect, organization-focused research has shown a steadily growing interest in religiosity and spirituality over the past decade. While organizational scholars have been slower to incorporate religion and spirituality into their research, psychologists have progressed enough to have a well-developed specialty area, the psychology of religion. This paper delves into the psychology of religion literature by presenting and discussing existing measures, their construction and specific purposes. This paper seeks to encourage, hearten and assist those who are beginning to explore religion and spirituality in the organizational studies.
After a degree of ambivalence and neglect, organization-focused research has shown a steadily growing interest in religiosity and spirituality over the past decade. By highlighting measures and measurement issues from psychology in this area, we hope to help accelerate the trend and to help ease the transition of management scholars newly entering this area of study.
While religion may be more discussed in public life in recent years (for reasons as diverse as the aging of baby boomers and the changing millennia to debating its role in global conflict and politics), the potential importance of religion and spirituality as variables in organizational life and research has not suddenly changed. It is almost certain that religiosity and spirituality have always been significant influences on individual attitudes and behaviors and the potential for that influence to have an effect in and for the organizations that employ them has always existed.
While organizational scholars have been slow to incorporate religiosity and spirituality into their research, psychologists have a history significant enough to have spawned a specialty area, the psychology of religion. Principally, psychologists have explored the influence of religiosity and spirituality on coping (Pargament, 1997). Other areas of exploration include the parameters and implications of spirituality and religiosity in clinical practice (Kelly, 1995; Ingersoll, 1994), forgiveness (McCullough and Worthington, 1994), cultural variation in religious and spiritual practices (Armstrong and Crowther, 2002), religion, spirituality, and aging (McFadden, 1996; Crowther et al, 2002) and faith and health (e.g. Plante and Sherman, 2001).
The purpose of this paper is not to review the work in psychology of religion in general (see Wulff, 1997; Hood et al, 1996), but to focus on...