<p> While the field of leadership can trace its roots to Plato, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli among many others, it has become a focus of contemporary academic studies in the last 50 to 75 years. And while spirituality can trace its origins to Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha, the exploration of the nexus of leadership and spirituality is much more recent and as a result, a limited body of knowledge exists and thus, is ripe for study.</p><p> Many challenges exist, including the fact that the study of leadership is a multidisciplinary academic field that includes a myriad of topics from a vast array of disciplines and spirituality, too, is extraordinarily diverse. This study explored a set of theories and tools to enable leaders to develop and support qualities in themselves and in those with whom they work and interact. Specifically, this work is a qualitative study exploring the nexus of leadership and spirituality, which addresses the gap in the literature that considers this intersection, as evidenced by the Venn diagram that includes leadership, spirituality, and thinking and behavioral attributes.</p><p> While a qualitative study, the quantitative element used is Emergenetics, a 30-year-old psychometric tool that looks at the four thinking attributes of analytical, structural, conceptual and social and the three behaviors of expressiveness, assertiveness and flexibility. With more than 630,000 profiles completed in 21 languages by people around the world, the universe for this study consisted of 14 one-to-one interviews and two focus groups of 14 people each, one in person and one online. The myriad of faith traditions with which the participants identified in their youth is provided in Table 2. With regard to the tradition with which participants identify today, of the 42 participants, 24 identify as Science of Mind/Religious Science and 18 identify with other faith traditions or no faith tradition.</p><p> The primary question was does spirituality influence leaders' thinking and behaviors. The secondary questions included an exploration around in what ways spirituality influences thinking and behaviors. It also explored the questions as to if spirituality informs the ways leaders challenge things in their organizations and if acknowledging one's spirituality publically helps or hinders building effective teams.</p><p> The highlights of the research include the finding that spirituality does indeed influence everything a leader does and is, whether thinking and behavior attributes and how a leader questions things. As well, while publicly acknowledging one's spirituality is thought to be positive, there are some confounding circumstances and those ideas are also presented.</p><p> The study also includes the group Emergenetics profiles for the two focus groups and all of the individual interviews as one profile, respectively, with an explanation as to how that informed the research.</p><p> Finally, the implications of this research to the study of leadership, the study of spirituality and leadership and the use of the Emergenetics tool in such work is explored.</p>

The purpose of this study was to examine the religious and spiritual experiences of transgender people. The study used an existing data set consisting of interviews from five self-identified Christian transgender participants, of which 1 was female-to-male, and 4 were male-to-female. Feminist phenomenology guided all aspects of this project. The results of the study suggest that participants felt a connection with a higher power, and specifically viewed themselves as made as transgender by God. However, the results of this study also indicated that transgender people feel conflicted about how others perceive them based on their (others') religious beliefs, with participants experiencing both supportive and discriminatory responses toward them.

Since Colonial America, higher education had a mission of producing student leaders, and at least in the early stages colleges and universities were also interested in the development of the spiritual lives of college students. By the mid-1800s, although spiritual and religious missions subsided, leadership development remained an outcome of higher education to varying degrees. In more recent years, voices in the academy have suggested that colleges and universities should reconsider their role in students' spiritual development. Within that conversation, combined with claims of leadership theorists, a relationship between leadership development and spirituality has been suggested. The purpose of this study was to provide an empirical examination of the relationship of a student's spiritual question to their development in the values of the social change model of leadership development. This study used data from the 2012 dataset of the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership. Findings from ANCOVA and HLM analysis suggested a small but statistically significant relationship between a student's engagement in spiritual quest and their development in the values of the social change model. Additionally, social perspective taking was found as a significant covariate. A student's engagement in spiritual quest and increases in a student's capacity for social perspective taking can predict a positive increase in the omnibus score of the socially responsible leadership scale. Higher education administrators and student development professionals may benefit by incorporating spirituality into leadership development programming. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 31, 2015. / leadership development, social perspective taking, spirituality, student development / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathy Guthrie, Professor Directing Dissertation; Diane Rice, University Representative; David Tandberg, Committee Member; Robert A. Schwartz, Committee Member.

Religion and spirituality are thought to be of great importance for the meaning and quality of life for many individuals, and research suggests that there may be important health benefits associated with religion and spirituality. Religion and spirituality should be related to health behaviors for a number of reasons. Health behaviors are important contributors to an individual's overall health, illness and mortality. Major negative health behaviors related to health outcomes are smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, obesity, risky driving, and high risk sexual behaviors. Health behaviors may also be linked to personality traits. The key trait examined for this study was extraversion. It includes adjectives such as being active, assertive, energetic, outgoing, and talkative. In this thesis, I take several hypotheses and explore the influence of extraversion, religiosity, and spirituality on health behaviors.

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Spirituality is a multifaceted construct, and often studied as a one- or two-dimensional variable. Recent work has resulted in the development of the RiTE model of spirituality. While preliminarily supported as a useful approach to measuring spirituality, little is known regarding its associations with other outcomes. Past studies have shown inverse associations between spirituality and psychological distress, which appears to be partially a function of social support derived from spiritual beliefs or practices. As such, the present study tested the relationship between the RiTE dimensions and psychache as mediated by multiple types of social support. Parallel mediation results from an undergraduate sample (N = 1994) showed that all three RiTE dimensions were indirectly associated with psychache via multiple forms of social support. Ritualistic and existential spirituality also displayed direct associations with psychache. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of past literature, applicable theoretical constructs, and treatment considerations.

Childhood chronic illness is replete with stressors that affect children's functioning across physical, social, emotional, and psychological domains. In this project, efforts were directed toward the identification and assessment of spirituality as a potential addition to the approach-avoidance paradigm of coping response. Twenty-two children diagnosed with either cancer or sickle cell disease were interviewed, along with their mothers, regarding psychosocial adjustment and typical approaches to coping with stressors. Children completed depression, anxiety, and quality of life questionnaires. Child participants were also asked to rate how often they utilized specific spiritual and general coping strategies in the month prior to the assessment. Mothers completed measures of depression and spiritual well-being, as well as parent proxy reports on their children's quality of life and use of spiritual coping. A factor analysis of the spiritual coping measure designed for use in the study (the Spiritual Coping Module) indicated strong support for the theoretically driven factors of religious and existential coping. Children's use of coping did not significantly account for heightened quality of life, nor for the presence of depressive and anxious symptomatology. However, maternal spiritual well-being accounted for 52.5% of the variance in self-reported maternal depression. Results are discussed in the context of improving children's adjustment to chronic illness through increased understanding of the child's and family's pattern of coping responses. / Master of Science

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