Spiritual Leadership: Meaning in the Sustainable Workplace
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the author for submitting the paper entitled "Spiritual leadership: meaning in the sustainable workplace ". I have gone through the manuscript with great interest. This article synthesizes prior research in spiritual leadership, underlining its contribution for creating sustainable workplaces. The author made a literature review of the concept of spiritual leadership, showing several definitions of this concept. Then, the author tries to note the importance of spirituality for achieving sustainable workplaces.
Although the topic is interesting, the article has some issues that, in my opinion, make that this article should not be published in the Sustainability journal. In the following lines I make some comments and suggestions that I believe your paper can benefit from and help strengthen it for future submissions.
My main concerns deal with the lack of scientific contribution of this article.
I agree that linking spiritual leadership with sustainable workplaces is a relatively new topic in management research. However, in my opinion, the author does not pay enough attention to relevant questions of this relationship. First of all, I miss more effort to define sustainable workplaces. As sustainability and sustainable development are umbrella terms which can be understood from different perspectives, I think that is interesting that the author revise literature about sustainable workplaces showing her view about that. Instead of that, the article is mainly focused on revising the concept of spiritual leadership.
In a period 40 days (more of less) the author revised 373 articles about spiritual leadership, starting with an article of 1980. While this analysis is interesting, I think that the effort between describing spiritual leadership and sustainable workplaces is not well balanced. The author should consider that sustainability issues are very important for Sustainability journal and the main aim of the article is “to present the achievement in academic knowledge of emerging concept of spiritual leadership in the context of the sustainable workplace in management science.” So, in my opinion, the relevance of spiritual leadership and sustainable workplace in the manuscript should be similar.
Paying more attention to sustainable workplaces will allow the author to show the ways that spiritual leadership can contribute to create sustainable workplaces. The current version of the manuscript, briefly note why spiritually in leadership contribute to develop sustainable workplaces. Instead of doing this, the text is more focused on showing positive effects of spiritual leadership on individual and organizational outcomes. Although this part of the manuscript is interesting, the link of this outcomes or other variables with sustainable workplaces is not well explained. I think the section 3.3 is a key section for this article and it should be improved.
Considering that this article does not include empirical research, I think the author could add value to this work by proposing a research model which show those determinants of developing sustainable workplaces related to spiritual leadership. She should mention those theories which explain the proposed relationships. This would add value to this research, opening avenues for researchers interested in examining the proposed relationships.
As in section 3.2. the author underlines the role of human resource management to create a positive workplace environment and to contribute to organizational sustainability, I think that using human resources managing literature and, particularly sustainable human resource management literature, could be useful to elaborate this model. I think it is interesting to highlight how human resource management can contribute to achieve sustainable workplaces by promoting spiritual leadership.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I would like to thank you very much for constructive feedback and give me the chance to improve my paper. I agree with the comments, especially with the suggestion about paying more attention to sustainability. I tried to improve the paper according to your suggestions.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents a review of spiritual leadership in the context of management theory. The importance of spiritual leadership is highlighted from the work presented in the literature. The aim of spiritual leadership is to recover the best shape individual, team, and organization. The paper is well written and a summary of the literature is presented in a meaningful manner. However, the paper suffers from some shortcoming which is highlighted below:
The similarity index of the paper is too high, i.e., approximately 30%. Hence the effort should be made on improving the script to avoid the pilgrims. Though it is review work, the similarity index of the paper can be further reduced. The author mentions the spanning period of 1980 to 2019. The author should highlight the rationale behind selecting this range. The methodology presented is quite useful for a wide readership. It is advised to provide a separate network diagram (Chart 1) for leadership and spiritual leadership. This will help in distinguishing the general concept of leadership from spiritual leadership. For this the author can do the literature review just focused on leadership. Otherwise just highlight the traits difference between leadership and spiritual leadership (like the purpose of caring, sharing, providing, controlling, directing, organizing the community, etc). The phycological impact of spiritual leadership should be highlighted where its advantage in the form of the ethical development of the workplace can occur as well as a sustainable environment. This will also lead to minimizing ethical fading in terms of exploitation, harassment, etc. The publications related to it can also be referred to. Tables 1 and 2 are nicely summarized. In the introduction, it is better to clear the notion of spiritual leadership referred to in the present work is inclusive of religious and ethical based concepts or not?[ Just a note: Though the concept of spiritual leadership with practicing framework can be looked at with lifetime examples in the form of written work on the life of prophet Jesus and Muhammad who established the exemplary leadership with the traits referred in the present work as well.]
The paper is well written and is useful for a wide readership.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I would like to thank you very much for constructive feedback and give me the chance to improve my paper. I agree with the most of comments and I tried to improve the paper according to your suggestions.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
This new version of the article addresses most of my previous comments. The author has clarified the meaning of sustainable workplace in this research. She has also noted the relevance of the human resource function to create sustainable workplaces, also underlining how spirituality can induce some positive employees’ behaviours and sustainable workplaces as well. I think the main concepts were clarified and the general idea is clear.
However, I still miss more development with regard to figure 3. In my previous comments I suggested that a research model which show determinants of developing sustainable workplaces related to spiritual leadership was needed. This version of the manuscript includes a new figure, the figure 3, which is very similar to figure 2. Once it is clear that spirituality or spiritual leadership are connected to sustainable workplaces and employees’ behaviours, you need to go a step further and show those ideas in a more specific way. I see four key variables: human resource management (HRM) practices and policies, sustainable workplaces, spiritual leadership and employees’ positive behaviours/employees’ well-being. What specific relationships are interesting to be examined? For instance, what HRM practices can promote spiritual leadership?
The present version of the manuscript includei nformation on these questions but, in my opinion, once you explain the general ideas, at least, you need to develop the figure 3 in order to show more detailed relationships among the relevant variables of your study.
I also miss some citations for some sentences:
p.10 Employees who are committed to their organizations, they are also committed to their society at large. Paying attention on the society is one of the main element of sustainability.
p.12 However, sustainability is created by sustainable workplace. Only through such individual spiritual leadership level transformation and spiritual workplace creation, the true sustainability in the workplace can be achieved.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you for clarification how I should develop the model. I hope that I understood well your suggestions. You can find a new model and its description on page 13. Now, the model seems to contribute value added to theory and show the constructs of creating sustainable workplace through spiritual leadership that can be further examined. Thank you once again for sharing your idea that helped me develop the paper and provide scientific contribution.
I also slightly change the sentences (line 342-343; and line 423-424) that you mentioned that “miss some citations for some sentences”. These sentences are my conclusions about the previous statements.
Sincerely,
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
I revised again the article entitled “Spiritual leadership: meaning in the sustainable workplace”. I see the author have tried to consider my last comments. However, in my opinion, the article still requires from further development. I think author should clarify the role of HRM practices in the model proposed in figure 3. The author mentions on p.16 that “impact of spiritual leadership on sustainable workplace through spirituality in the workplace and HRM practices can be a starting point for researchers for further development”. This sentence suggest that HRM would be a mediating variable in this model. However, HRM are not included on figure 3, which shows the research model.
While I think that the topic of the article is interesting, I think that addressing my comments involve working more than just a few days on them. The proposed research model is the main contribution of this research. The author has tried to modify it to address my comments but I think more reflexion about that point is needed, since the role of some variables in the proposed model is not clear enough.
I encourage the author to take time to do it and resubmitting a new version of the article.
I know this result is disappointing. I hope that the comments prove useful to you in developing your work.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you for further suggestions. Please see the attachment with my answers.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
