Collective Spirituality: Integrative Conceptualization and Implications for Organization Design

In times of fake news, collective distrust and discordance, how can we be together, differently? With its topic of Collective Spirituality in Organizational Settings, this work suggests by being together for experiencing an integral unity while going about our day. A collective spiritual experience in the day to day, what is it and how can it be lived? As research in the field of Management, Spirituality and Religion the ‘day to day’ of this work is placed in organizational settings. The lived Hindu example of this dissertation is the āśrama (Hindu monastery). This lived example manifests a worldview that is, similarly to the Integrative paradigm (Nandram et al., 2017) this research is conducted from, based in an ontological understanding of relationality and inherent sanctity of all of life. Work that is created from an integral unity perspective, which I aspire to do with this dissertation, can contribute to shedding light on the cracks left by a fragmentation-biased society. This dissertation follows an applied orientation and contributes to the Management, Spirituality and Religion discipline (Rocha et al., 2025) and its academic discourse. Within the spirituality studies aspect of MSR, the work centers on Hindu spirituality, (e.g., Bindlish et al., 2019; Nandram, 2022). From the management perspective, it chooses macro-organizational behavior with a specialization in organization design as its area of contribution. While having taken all levels of analysis into account, the main focus of analysis is the macro-organizational behavior perspective. The final study responds to questions on the transferability of insights from an āśrama to the non-spiritual-purpose organization by investigating this very transferability as its research question. By doing so this work contributes to transdisciplinary transfer research (Nagy et al., 2020). This dissertation contributes a conceptual resource of collective spirituality in organizational settings; the study of the academic discourse on collective spirituality in organizational settings in a systematic scoping review; a classic grounded theory which gives propositions on how to realize and live one’s divine essence in āśramas; an analytical narrative describing the characteristics of an organization that has the spiritual experience as organizing principle while holding a non-spiritual purpose, as well as major concepts and their relationships of an organization design that enables aforementioned organization as well as facilitating a collective spiritual experience. Epistemologically speaking, this dissertation intends to add a case for Integrative research. This work intending Integrativeness contributes to Hindu spirituality studies by offering a resolution of the challenge of researching Hinduism with translation and interpretation only (Ranganathan, 2007, 2018). In conclusion, this study on collective spirituality in organizational settings based on a Hindu lived example serves the societal search for wholing and fills knowledge gaps in the study of Management, Spirituality and Religion, particularly from a macro-organizational behavior perspective. By studying both organizational settings that have the enablement of spiritual experiences as purpose and those that do not, this study widens the potential social impact to various social contexts. The research speaks to researchers and practitioners interested in organizational behavior as it intersects with spiritual studies and to those who are intrigued by facilitating new paradigms. The work can best be accessed having had experiences that inquired or gave insights into questions such as “Who am I beyond the psychological layers of me?” or “What am I here for?”. I am hoping for the reader to take away inspiration, an invitation for reflection and insight into ways of being human together.