Management, Spirituality, and Religion MSR

The MSR-AOM - Management Spirituality and Religion Division (MSR) continues our campaign to highlight unmissable sessions at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (July 31 - August 4, 2026)!

Here's a session that bridges research, practice, and organizational transformation.

🏢 MSR PAPER SESSION

Religion and Spirituality Shaping Workplace Culture

📅 When: Monday, August 3 | 9:45 - 11:15 AM EDT

📍 Where: Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Second Floor Mezzanine: Regency B (1200 Market St)

Session Moderator: Megan Bolin, John Carroll University

Featured Presentation:

🧘 Beyond Individual Coping: How Organizations Institutionalize Spiritual Coping

Presenters:

Gahana Rao, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai

Veena Vohra, Professor, Human Resources and Behavioral Science at SBM, NMIMS, Mumbai

🔍 Why This Research Matters:

Organizations worldwide are introducing meditation, yoga, and spiritual coping practices in response to chronic workplace strain-but how do these initiatives move beyond pilot programs to become sustainable organizational routines?

Key Insights from This Two-Study Sequential Design:

📊 Study 1 - Systematic review of 50 workplace spiritual coping studies reveals that successful institutionalization requires:

✅ Legitimacy under secular norms

✅ Adoption through reduced participation friction in everyday work design

✅ Sustainability by managing tensions between meaning-based experience and metric-based accountability

🎯 Study 2 - 12 semi-structured interviews with executives, HR and learning leaders in Indian organizations unveil a temporal process model:

Phase 1: Initiation → Risk problematization & secular translation

Phase 2: Diffusion → Temporal entrainment & structural signaling

Phase 3: Institutionalization → Material anchoring & selective coupling

💡 Theoretical Contribution:

This research theorizes spiritual coping as organizational work unfolding over time and extends institutional theory by specifying phase-specific mechanisms and transition conditions through which contested practices become routine.

📌 Essential for HR professionals, organizational development practitioners, and scholars interested in workplace well-being and spiritual practices!

Organized by the MSR-AOM - Management Spirituality and Religion Division

#AOM2026 #MSRDivision #Philadelphia #WorkplaceSpirituality #OrganizationalCulture #EmployeeWellbeing #HRInnovation #InstitutionalTheory #AcademyOfManagement

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Dr. Ekaterina Ivanova
Associate Professor
GSB, HSE University
MSR Communications
and Outreach Lead
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