Fry (2005) defines spiritual leadership as
comprising the values, attitudes, and behav-iors that are necessary to intrinsically moti-vate self and others to enhance a sense of spir-itual survival through calling and membership.
Yet, some authors criticize Fry’s model as well
as other models of spirituality and leadership
for not providing a sufficient understanding
of what constitutes spirituality and the ways
in which it ties to leadership. For example,
Benefiel (2005) criticized the work on spiri-tuality and leadership, stating that it “inad-vertently draws upon outdated, discredited, or
shallow approaches to spirituality; they reinvent
the wheel; they dip into credible theories of
spirituality but then don’t fully develop them
or resolve the conflicts among them. While
these theories are comprehensive and creative
in the context of leadership studies, a more ro-bust, up-to-date, and sophisticated understand-ing of spirituality is needed if theories of spir-itual leadership are to stand up under scrutiny
and be taken seriously in the wider academy” (p.
727). Finally, there still seem to be two schools
of thought in this area of leadership research:
In one school, a set of scholars discuss spiri-tuality in the theological sense (Whittington
et al. 2005), whereas in the other school, the
focus is more on understanding the inner mo-tivation and drive a leader creates in followers
to enhance workplace spirituality (Fry 2005).
Until a definition of what constitutes spiritu-ality and leadership is agreed upon, it will be
difficult to conceptualize and measure these
constructs.