Driving organizational entrainment through spiritual leadership

Connectedness is considered as one of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century, with organizational research highlighting the importance of time, pace, rhythm, and cycles in business through the phenomenon of entrainment. Entrainment is a process of synchronization and connectedness within, between, and across rhythmic activities. This conceptual paper argues that applying spiritual leadership at each level of an organization can drive the (inter)connectedness in today’s organizations through entrainment. First, the concept of entrainment is introduced, with a focus on intraentrainment. The learnings from entrainment are then applied to spiritual leadership theory to enrich it. As such, it proposes a basis for new empirical research in the fields of leadership and organizational entrainment.