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This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of financial institutions (FI) banks.

This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the UK. The data collected were analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.

The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges and subjective quantitatively driven key performance indicators, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigerian FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.

To support LMs in better understanding and managing FIs BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other FIs’ industry stakeholders and future researchers in the field.

Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how LMHRPs impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms that LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.

Practitioners and management researchers have chorused the salvific tendencies of spiritual intelligence. Whilst the emergence of spirituality and its derivatives in the workplace is widely acclaimed, the conflict that exists between spiritual ideals and the capitalist ethos of modern organisations raises questions about dark manifestations. This incongruence necessitates the consideration of the misuse of spiritual intelligence.

This paper adopts conceptual lens and theoretical arguments to interrogate the assumption of absolute constructiveness that is accorded spiritual intelligence in its framing and discusses the potential of a dark side.

The dark side of spiritual intelligence is its deployment to achieve self-serving purposes, to harm, rather than to help others. More practitioners and management researchers must acknowledge that spiritual intelligence and workplace spirituality may have dark manifestations and incorporate this reality in the assessment of organisations and the individuals within them.

This exploratory article joins the sparse extant literature on the dark side of spiritual intelligence and workplace spirituality. It contributes to the literature by offering critical insights into spiritual intelligence and the need to integrate the potential for misuse in the existing models.