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Spiritually Anchored Leadership

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Ethical Leadership
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Abstract

This chapter introduces a new framework for analysing and capturing the range of different leadership value systems. Building on the concept of ‘career anchors’ (Schein, 1990), this chapter introduces the concept of ‘spiritual anchors’, those patterns of deeply held spiritual motives, values, and attitudes that provide direction, meaning, wholeness, and connectedness to a person’s life or work. Based on a concept of spirituality derived from the Sufi tradition, supplemented by qualitative interviews conducted with 32 managers in Turkey, this article develops a typology of spiritual anchors, each of which can be thought of as the spiritual DNA of a person, or a fractal of that person’s holistic value system. The spiritual anchors stem from nine Sufi paths. Each of the spiritual anchors refers to a unique way of perceiving and practising spirituality. People from each of the anchors have a different perspective, and make a unique contribution to organisational life.

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Karakas, F. (2011). Spiritually Anchored Leadership. In: Millar, C., Poole, E. (eds) Ethical Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299061_13

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