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The following essay was an invited piece in the MSR Winter 2013/14 Newsletter. In case you missed it there, I am sending it to this listserv in the hope that Jerry's efforts might prove fruitful in generate some discussion and/or thought around our community/interest group.  Please post your comments and questions to this listerv – let's start a conversation!

Stacie

Dr. Stacie Chappell

Assistant Professor of Management

College of Business

Western New England University

1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield MA

A year ago I retired from teaching at the University of Scranton, after teaching Management courses there for over thirty years – many of those courses incorporating elements of management, spirituality and religion in them. Over the course of the thirty some years, I managed to be promoted to full professor - with almost all of my publications and presentations being related to the areas of management, spirituality and religion.  Over the past year, as a retired Professor Emeritus, I have been doing a lot of meditating and prayer as to what my career to date has meant or accomplished, and what I am being called to do next. My prayer and meditation on these questions has led me to several realizations, which, on further prayer and reflection, seem to me to be applicable to the Management, Spirituality and Religion Interest Group (MSR) in its current stage of development. I will begin these reflections with the realizations about my own career, and then relate them to my thoughts about where MSR has been to date and my concerns about where MSR might be heading. I will organize these realizations around the three general areas by which we as academics are traditionally evaluated for tenure and promotion – namely, service, scholarship, and teaching.

Individual Reflections:

• Service at most universities is generally split between service to the University, service to the profession, and service to the community. This service is usually demonstrated by service and/or leadership on a variety of committees or boards – which ultimately ends up being related to one's political expertise in gaining membership on the committees and boards and one's political expertise in both being a member and  a leader of these committees and boards. In the course of my career at the University, I was privileged to serve on many committees and boards  - within the University, in my local community, and within several academic communities – most notable for this paper being that I was the first Chair of MSR. My experience on all of these boards and committees taught me a lot about university and academic politics, which I was able to teach to my students in the Power and Politics in the Organization course that I developed and taught to MBA students for over 25 years. On reflection, engaging in politics was the least meaningful part of my academic career. It was pragmatically useful at the time for gaining tenure and promotion, and was very good for building up my ego, but ultimately seems to have had little lasting contribution.

• Scholarly activity for me has focused on MSR related subjects, and most of it did not involve empirical research. The articles I wrote that seemed to have the most impact were theoretical articles and research using non-traditional research methods. Even more impactful were books that I co-edited. In my experience, empirical articles in journals seem to be the least impactful (and the least read), even though most universities (and AACSB) place more emphasis on them. If the criteria for impact were the degree to which the scholarship actually influenced or changed managerial or student behavior, then I would say that the only things that I wrote which seemed to have any such impact were the articles and books involving teaching methodologies and the use of stories in the classroom, as these may have had an impact on teachers who used them in their classes and subsequently may have changed some of their students' behaviors.

• Teaching was the activity that had the biggest impact, and was my most meaningful activity.  Some of the students I taught over the past thirty plus years continue to contact me to tell me how I influenced or changed their behaviors, or how the courses were meaningful to their lives and to their careers. Each of the courses that I taught involved engaging students in writing and self-reflection and small group discussion, and each had very little lecturing.

Reflections on MSR

• Service - Since serving as the first Chair of MSR, I have remained involved with MSR over the years in several capacities, and have been watching with great interest the efforts of MSR leadership to serve its membership and to apply for division status within the Academy of Management. Throughout its existence MSR leadership and members have balanced several seemingly conflicting interests:

o   Those interested more in spirituality vs. those interested more in religion

o   Those wanting to be accepted (or taken more seriously) by other members or divisions of the Academy of Management vs. those who are more interested in pursuing a uniquely MSR vision of scholarship.

o   Those advocating more rigorous empirical research vs. those who would rather pursue more creative non-traditional research

o   Those who want to incorporate spiritual practices into their academic life vs. those who feel MSR should be solely about teaching and research like the other AOM divisions and interest groups

o   Those who feel MSR retreats should consist mostly of silence and spiritual practice vs. those who feel MSR retreats function more like corporate retreats involving more socializing and group activities vs. those who don't see any value at all or who question the value of even having MSR retreats.

These tensions can all be subsumed under a broader concern or tension between those who want MSR and MSR activities to be accepted by the other members of the AOM  - with the underlying perception, which may or may not be true, that the other AOM members look suspiciously at MSR members as being non-scientific or "flakes" or some similar word – and those MSR members who think MSR should pursue its own direction and path.

Whatever direction MSR members and its leadership decide to pursue, I believe it is important for MSR members and leadership to pay particular attention to the spiritual and religious values of its members. In other words, MSR members should "walk the talk" and MSR leaders should, at a minimum, practice spiritual leadership (however they wish to define it, or whatever model they choose to follow) in the manner in which they lead the MSR group and interact with the greater AOM community. We do research and teach regarding spirituality and management and spiritual leadership, and we should practice what we research and teach. This is the reason that early MSR leadership decided to have a yearly spiritual retreat at a retreat following the annual AOM meeting. Having attended many of the past MSR retreats, I found the retreats to be an excellent opportunity to unwind from the Academy meeting and to reconnect with my purpose in teaching and scholarship. I especially found the periods of silence and meditation useful for this purpose. The retreats also provide an excellent opportunity to connect with other MSR members. 

In a similar way, I think it is very important that MSR members be aware of the potential for non-spiritual ego to manifest – in such ways as mentioning or advertising only those specific sessions in which we ourselves are involved or presenting, while not mentioning anyone else's sessions, or bragging to other members about our own research rather than encouraging dialogue about how we can be helpful to others in their research. While I know that these behaviors are common in academia, and that we all have a tendency or perhaps a desire to do those things, I believe that those of us in MSR should at least be aware of the tendency and try to "walk the talk".

• Scholarship - As mentioned above, there has always been a healthy tension within MSR between those members advocating more rigorous empirical research vs. those who would rather pursue more creative non-traditional research. Some MSR members see rigorous empirical research published in AOM journals or similar level journals as the only way to have MSR members and topics taken seriously by the rest of the AOM membership, or the only way that they will be able to pass their dissertation or get tenure or get promotion.

In the early years of the MSR interest group there were many interesting and creative presentations of non-traditional research in dissertations and in conference presentations – including the use of drawings, collages, and other non-traditional research techniques. I believe that there is a valid place in MSR, and indeed in the AOM, for all types of research, and that non-traditional research should be as rigorous as empirical research. I am concerned, however, that in the desire to gain more acceptance by non-MSR members, research has become increasingly empirical squeezing out non-empirical contributions.  The emphasis in many studies is on how spirituality or religion (however defined in the particular study) can be used to increase corporate profits or can be used to make the organization more efficient or productive to improve the bottom line.  Less research focuses on how spirituality or religion can be used to enhance the quality of life within an organization – unless this enhancing  leads to improving the "bottom line". I think it would be interesting to see more research that attempts to deal with both spirituality and religion, and that investigates new methods for measuring such seemingly ineffable and hard to measure (or even to define) concepts as altered states of mind and levels of consciousness.

• MSR Teaching - As with my experience with teaching, my experience with attending MSR sessions at past AOM meetings is that the sessions that are most well attended and seem to generate the most interest have been the PDW sessions that dealt with teaching MSR concepts. In past years these sessions have often described very original and creative methods for teaching a variety of MSR concepts, including the kinds of concepts I described above as seemingly ineffable and hard to measure (or even to define).  I have found that the MSR retreats have provided an excellent opportunity for me to informally share and discuss ideas for improving teaching and scholarship with other MSR members.

Concluding remarks

I believe that MSR in the AOM is at an interesting stage of development. Many of the original "founding parents" have either stopped being involved with the group or have drastically cut back their involvement with the group – turning things over to the next generation. My concern is that some of the newer members of MSR have lost sight of or did not experience first-hand  the original values and culture of the group in its early years at the AOM.  People who attended MSR sessions in those early years used to stay for other MSR sessions, and often expressed how welcoming those sessions were to new attendees. Despite the tensions that I described above, we were managing to create a new field of research with new ways of researching it, and with a climate of warmth and acceptance. For several years, MSR was the fastest growing group in the AOM.

My hope for MSR in the coming years is that we pursue what is of interest to our members, and worry less about whether what we are doing will be accepted by the larger AOM community. We can provide a much needed perspective for the larger AOM, as has been alluded to in previous years when the topic of AOM conferences has dealt with MSR related topics, as will again be the case next year. I believe that MSR will ultimately gain more respect and acceptance by the AOM as we continue to pursue our research interests in ways that interest us.   

Dr. Jerry Biberman, is Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Scranton (retired from full time teaching in 2012). Jerry served as founding coeditor of the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, and has co-edited several special editions on work and spirituality for the Journal of Organizational Change Management. He was a founder and first chair of the Management, Spirituality and Religion interest group of the Academy of Management. Jerry currently lives with his wife Linda in Las Vegas, Nevada.