Leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness: Skills, factors affecting, and their effects on performance (a qualitative study by grounded theory)

• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Author: Nawal A. Al Eid,Boshra A. Arnout,Ayed A. Almoied
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2129

ACADEMIC PAPER

Leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness: Skills, factors

affecting, and their effects on performance (a qualitative study

by grounded theory)

Nawal A. Al Eid

1

| Boshra A. Arnout

2,3

| Ayed A. Almoied

2

1

Department of Islamic studies, Faculty of

Arts, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman

University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

2

Department of Psychology, King Khalid

University, Abha, Saudi Arabia

3

Department of Psychology, Zagazig

University, Zagazig, Egypt

Correspondence

Boshra A. Arnout, Department of Psychology,

King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia.

Email: prof.arnout74@gmail.com; beahmad@

kku.edu.sa

Spiritual intelligence has received increasing quantitative research interest, while

there is still no attention regarding to investigate spiritual intelligence with applying

qualitative methods, especially grounded theory design. This study aimed to detect

the skills, affecting factors, and the effects of spiritual intelligence and religiousness

on performance. The qualitative analysis of the data collected through the in-depth

interview of the participants after encoding and classification, and the continuous

comparison of the data by encoding and data by axes, resulted in these data can be

coded in three axes: leader's spiritual intelligence skills, factors that affect leader's

spiritual intelligence, and the effects of leader's spiritual intelligence on performance.

The results revealed that there are five skills of leader's spiritual intelligence: work-

life balance skill, consists of (5) sub-skills, leadership transcendence skill includes (6)

sub-skills, leadership meaning and purpose production skill includes (4) sub-skills,

leadership mindfulness skill consists of (9) sub-skills, and the fifth skill is leadership

virtue behavior includes (8) sub-skills. And also, the results indicated that there are

many factors that impact the leader's spiritual intelligence, were classified into three

objects: personal (three factors), social and family (two factors), and work factors (4

factors). All participants were agreed unanimously that the leader's spiritual intelli-

gence and religiousness are determined and affect the performance of the leader and

his subordinates, these were classified into two objects: The first object is a leader's

work-performance, consisting of (16) indicators, and the second object is a workers

performance includes (12) indicators. In light of these results, the study rec-

ommended the necessity of developing leaders' awareness of the importance of pas-

sion of spiritual intelligence skill and their impacts on performance. Thus, these

findings shed new light on the importance of developing leaders' spiritual intelligence

skills to resolve leadership problems, and increasing productivity, creativity, and well-

being among leaders and workers in Arab World.

Received: 17 January 2020 Revised: 1 February 2020 Accepted: 9 March 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2129

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2129