SPIRITUALITY AND INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOUR IN TEAMS: EXAMINING THE MEDIATING ROLE OF TEAM LEARNING

Creative and innovative contributions by employees greatly influence an organisation’s success. Beyond knowledge and skills, innovation requires an inner force that pushes employees to persevere with challenges that are inherent in creative work. Workplace spirituality is the search for meaning or higher purpose, social connectedness, inner life, and transcendence or a higher-level calling at work. Spirituality at work is conceptualised at the individual, group, and organisational levels. To be more innovative, contemporary organisations often rely on teams. Team-level learning is found to be particularly vital in promoting innovation and preparing organisations to respond to challenges posed by technological advancements, globalisation, and the requirements of sustainable development.

The role of spirituality in learning is well recognised in the literature. However, this association at the collective level and in the context of business organisations has not been elucidated conceptually and examined empirically. Synthesising the ideas of positive affect, adult learning theory, work engagement, and the componential theory of creativity, we propose and examine the relationships among spiritual climate, team learning, and team innovative work behaviours. Data were collected from 336 employees of 66 teams across business organisations in India. An analysis of relationships was performed with team-level aggregated scores of individual responses using structural equation modelling. Results suggest that spiritual climate has a positive association with learning in teams, and that team learning mediates the relationship between spiritual climate and team-level innovative behaviours. Implications for human resources management and organisational development are discussed.