Hiii! Welcome to Julie’s blog! Here I’m going to talk about different subjects of psychology. Indeed, I’m a work psychologist student in last year of master! Hope you’ll like it 😊
Today, I would like to give you a resume of my research about spirituality. In order to validate my master, I had to find a subject of psychology. I chose to study the work spirituality in a teleworking context because of the sanitary crisis that we have to go through.
You are probably asking yourself WHY I chose to associate work & spirituality? Well, let me explain!
Title of my memory: Spirituality at work in the context of telework
Since the beginning of 2020, the world has been facing an unprecedented pandemic caused by the coronavirus. This health crisis has forced individuals to adapt and reduce their social relationships physically. Teleworking has, therefore, emerged at the professional level and has called into question the meaning of work, relationships between employees, communication, management, etc. Thus, the present study wants to assess the level of spirituality of teleworkers.
But what is the work spirituality? It’s an individual experience that aims to seek a purpose in life. It’s a spiritual path that promotes personal development and self-realization in the context of work. In fact, spirituality at work is to admit that each person (colleagues, superiors, etc.) has an inner and outer life and that it is important to let these individuals develop their spirit within this professional environment.
We wonder if there are any differences within this population and what they are. Confronted with this problem, we assume that depending on age, telework duration, etc. the spiritual scores will not be the same.
Method:
In order to verify our hypotheses, a questionnaire of spirituality in telework was proposed to the participants – the Halim & al. ’s Workplace Spirituality Measurement Tool (2019) – with sociodemographic questions as well. Composed of 30 items, we have changed a few so that this questionnaire is adapted to teleworking. 132 people from all over France participated in our online survey. To test our different hypotheses, the Jamovi statistical software was used. For all tests, the dependent variable has always been the spirituality score with the different factors that make it up. The questionnaire works with a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5, where a low score means a low level of spirituality and a score that tends to 5 shows a high level of spirituality.
Results:
The results obtained did not show significant results in the population but tendentious effects that validate our hypotheses. Indeed, for the first hypothesis for example, the correlation matrix performed shows that the total level of spirituality will not vary significantly depending on the number of days telework done by the participants. Namely, the correlation between these two variables is negative, which means that as the number of teleworking days increases, the level of spirituality will tend to decrease.
It can be said that the length of telework done per week, its implementation before or after the Covid-19, and the age of individuals can be variables that influence the level of spirituality.
Discussion:
We discussed limitations of this research, in particular methodological ones. Indeed, there is a significant difference in numerical representativeness in the composition of the study sample between males (25%) and females (75%). A higher number of participants may have made the data more conclusive. Also, some socio-demographic data could have been further elaborated to get more details on participants
Conclusion:
The aim of this study was to highlight the level of spirituality of teleworkers in France in order to observe the influence of telework on this object of study. Despite the fact that the majority of the results were not significant in view of a relatively small sample and unequal groups, the assumptions made in this study have tendentious effects that are in our view.
It can be concluded that the longer people have teleworked in their company, the more they tend to develop a high level of spirituality. This is especially noticeable for employees who were teleworking prior to Covid-19. Also, the gender and age of the participants have no significant influence on the different spiritual scores. Also, one or two days working at home allows to maintain a good level of spirituality compared to those who telework longer.
I hope you learnt something new & that you’re aware now that spirituality isn’t necessarily related only to religion!
Keywords: Spirituality – Teleworking – Teleworking spirituality – Employees – Work – Covid