In her research Englert explores how spirituality is experienced collectively within organisations. She focuses on settings such as offices, classrooms and medical practices, and examines how organisations can create conditions in which people can discover and live who they are individually and collectively.
‘The motivation for this research came from both professional experience and a broader concern about the role organisations play in society,’ says Englert. According to her organisations should: ‘serve humanity in becoming fully itself rather than treating people merely as a cog in a machine.’
Spirituality and organisation design
Drawing on qualitative empirical methods, Englert analyses a first understanding of collective spirituality from a relational worldview and derives its implications for organisation design. One part of the research consists of a systematic literature review mapping definitions, concepts and research trends related to collective spirituality in organisational contexts.
Another study, based on grounded theory methodology and fieldwork in India, examines how people in Hindu spiritual organisational environments seek to realise and live their “divine essence”. The third study looks at the implications of this grounded theory for organisations that use the spiritual experience as an organising principle while still pursuing non-spiritual goals, with a focus on what that means for their organisation design.
Organisations can contribute to social healing
Englert’s research contributes to debates in the domain of management, spirituality and religion, particularly from a macro-organisational behaviour perspective. At the same time, the research aims to provide practical tools for researchers and practitioners interested in creating new organisational paradigms.
Englert: ‘Organisations can play an important role in addressing social fragmentation and strengthening relationships between people and other-than-humans. My research shows how working with organisations offers many possibilities to contribute to the ‘wholing’ of a fragmented society. This idea is at the heart of my work on collective spirituality in organisational settings.'