Exploration of the interaction between spirituality and market orientation: Causes and effects on managers

Spirituality in the workplace is an emerging concept, which has generated definitions such as 'the spiritually-based firm' (Wagner-Marsh & Conley 1999). The novel nature of this concept, together with the lack of widely-accepted definitions, leads to calls for further research in this field. One of the recent lines of research is the intersection between spirituality and marketing philosophy, with recommendations for exploring whether managers who follow a societal marketing orientation are also inspired by the spiritual paradigm (Vasconcelos 2011) to explore the contribution societal marketing makes to job satisfaction and personal meaning at work (Tang et al. 2011). The research question posed by this paper is how hotel managers in Spain perceive and manage the interrelationship between spirituality at work and a societal marketing orientation. This paper explores the different concepts involved by considering three issues: (1) the use and acceptance of spirituality in work; (2) the relationship between spirituality and corporate guidelines; (3) the relationship between spirituality and societal marketing strategies. The study contributes twenty-four empirical cases to reveal what managers think the causes and effects of this interrelationship are. The main research contribution is an initial framework of three fields that are considered as priorities for managing the interrelationship between spirituality and marketing