Spirituality, individual values & organizational values: The impact on internal communication & CSR

By Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, professor at Purdue University, and Neva Štumberger, doctoral student at Purdue University

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to have gained traction in the latter part of the 20th Century, principally after the establishment of Global Compact in 2000 by then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, even though CSR-like practices can be discerned much before this period. We also challenge the myth that CSR is a U.S. and Western European phenomenon because although the term CSR may not have been used, corporations in many parts of the world had adopted responsible and responsive practices long before the term was coined in the West but these practices have largely gone unnoticed by CSR literature. Further, scholarship on CSR has for the most part ignored the significance of core individual and cultural values and morals on organizational CSR practices.

We contend that most humans are spiritual beings and are directly or indirectly influenced by religion, whether they consider themselves to be religious or not. Yet, the nexus between CSR and spirituality and religion have been missing from most discussions of CSR, among scholars as well as practitioners. In particular, we see the need for greater focus on how organizational discourse (for example, internal communication) is shaped by CSR as a manifestation of an organization’s ethics initiatives, as well as the spiritual values of the individuals in the organization.

The primary purpose of our project is to study the spiritual and religious values espoused by employees and assess how these may influence organizational values as manifested in the organization’s CSR perceptions and practices. At the micro level of analysis, our study focuses on the relationship between spirituality (and religion), and employee values and their impact on CSR as a manifestation of ethical practice. At the meso level of analysis, we seek to discern how these individual values are negotiated within the organizational context (through internal communication) to generate organizational values that act as the determinants of CSR as a manifestation of organizational ethics.

Data for this study are being collected through qualitative interviews with communication practitioners in two diverse cultures – India and Slovenia – both of which have very different histories and cultures, including religious heritage. Our rationale for including these two distinct cultures (countries) in our study is based on their diverse traditions as well as what we perceive to be current perspectives vis-à-vis religion and spirituality in the two countries.

We believe that such a cross-cultural comparison will not only provide interesting findings about the interplay between spiritual and/or individual values, organizational ethics, and CSR in the two cultures, but will also add to the overall (rather limited) understanding of spirituality and religion (as part of culture and tradition) as important drivers for CSR broadening the horizons of the field.

This project is supported by a Page Center Legacy Scholar Grant from The Arthur W. Page Center.