SPIRITUALITY AND EMPLOYEES’ WORK ATTITUDE IN SELECTED WORKPLACES IN OYO AND LAGOS STATES, NIGERIA

Abstract

The spiritual paradigm that recognizes that people work not only with their hands, but also with their hearts or spirit, led to investigating whether spirituality have anything to do with employees work attitude in the workplace. The descriptive survey design of the ex-post-facto type was used for the study. The participants consist of respondents from the Ministry of Social Welfare and Women Development in the Civil Service of Oyo and Lagos States. The stratified sampling technique was used to put the ministry workers into junior, middle and management levels. Fifty respondents were randomly selected from each level to give a total of 150 from each state. A questionnaire tagged “Workplace Spirituality and Employees Work Attitude Questionnaire- WESEWAQ” with five sub-sections was used for data collection. Of the three hundred questionnaires administered, 252 were returned and used for analysis. Findings from the study showed that organization commitment, job involvement and intrinsic work satisfaction correlated significantly with meaningful work, sense of community and alignment of workplace values, while intention to quit does not correlate with meaningful work; sense of community correlated positively with the four aspects of worker’s attitude in the workplace. Furthermore, alignment of workplace values, an aspect of workplace spirituality, correlated positively with the four aspects of worker’s attitude in the workplace. It was recommended that industrial social workers should reinforce spirituality values of both management and employees by aligning management’s perception, employees’ perception to organizational perception of spirituality with the intent of encouraging positive performance and good work attitude from the employees.