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With increasing ethical issues and global corporate scandals, many organisations are now looking to employ well-rounded professionals, who take ownership of their workplace while leading with their heart and soul. These organisations seem to be more concerned with relationship building and future employability (Cunha, Rego, & D’Oliveira, 2006) and are interested in the concept of spirituality with the hope that it could address ethical issues influencing their businesses.

‘Spirituality and ethics are core values that have shaped human life from time immemorial’ (Mahadevan, 2013, p. 91). Ethics and spirituality are interrelated but different as ethics is about customs and habits, while spirituality is concerned with personal meaningful experiences and differs from person to person, making it hard to define.

Organisations moving towards spirituality require leadership that can develop a spiritual climate and their learning and development has to be top priority (Pawar, 2009).

This requires management education to appreciate the concept of spirituality and like some universities globally, incorporate it within their programmes (Harris & Crossman, 2005).

To explore whether spirituality could be incorporated within the higher education curriculum, my PhD researched academic’s viewpoints in selected faculties within a regional university in Australia. This paper reports some of its findings from the data gathered through semi-structured interviews, with a focus on leadership, its relevance to ethics and the teaching of spirituality. Results indicate that academics support the inclusion of spirituality but the programmes need to be carefully designed.

It is doubtful whether Max Weber would have been appreciative of his current status as the father of organisation theory. Weber did not develop the concept of bureaucracy as part of a quest to advance a science of organisations, or in order to do a microanalysis of the internal structure of particular organisational units. The concept of bureaucracy was an ideal-typical concept developed as a point of departure for comparisons across historical periods and geographic settings. Weber’s research was motivated by macroscopic and historical questions such as ‘why did capitalism develop in the West’ and, ‘how do persons in the West and other civilizations attach meaning to their activities?’ Unlike consultants and organisation theorists that make use of him today, it was not a major concern for Weber to develop criteria for the most efficient kinds of organisations. Rather, his concern was to identify variations in administrative and bureaucratic cultures and patterns by the means of the bureaucratic ideal type. It is maintained in modern textbooks in organisation theory that there has been a development from a closed and rationalistic paradigm towards an understanding of organisations as open and natural systems, and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is taken as a point of departure for this kind of narrative. This classification of Weber as an example of a rational and closed approach is highly questionable. The cross-societal and historical approach used so effectively by Weber, is put on a sidetrack in such mainstream narratives. It would be more in the spirit of Weber to focus on organising as an activity, bureaucracy as an ethos and to study organisations within their particular political and cultural contexts.

Global virtual teams (GVTs), also known as transnational or distributed teams, are increasingly common as organizations strive to maintain a global presence, find top and diverse talent, and cope with economic constraints. Despite increasing adoption of GVTs, there is a dearth of research addressing whether GVTs are an effective coping strategy for dealing with the world economic crisis and if there are unintended negative consequences on employee well-being as a result of their use. Thus, a focal question guiding the development of this chapter is whether or not GVTs are a sustainable solution for organizations? In this chapter we present a generic framework depicting the cycle by which macroeconomic demands impose changes on organization's structures, which trickle down to the level of the individual who has to cope with the demands the new structure has imposed. We discuss GVTs as an intervention (or cure) for organizations’ dealing with the current world economic crisis and how this organizational intervention inevitably becomes the context (or cause) for the kinds of stressors or demands employees face.

Spectacular corporate failures including One Tel, Ansett, HIH, Enron and Worldcom and the recent fiasco with National Australia Bank are evidence of a legitimacy crisis in current corporate governance practices. This paper analyses the organisational impact of recent “best practice” guidelines and the recommendations for reform. We conclude that substantive concerns still exist and it is likely that companies will utilise a “tick the box” approach emphasising form over substance governance changes. We argue for a two-fold approach to embed effective ongoing reform. The first involves cultural change(s) at the boardroom level to develop a “real” team approach. This would embrace the use of constructive conflict in the decision-making process and also incorporate elements of trust and openness. Constructive conflict, we argue, leads to real and effective boardroom behavioural changes.

The second strand of reform proposes that such changes should be extended into the internal decision-making (enterprise governance) arena. Such a move towards organisational pluralism devolves decision-making and allows greater employee involvement in the “running” of organisations. It also entails a significant re-framing of organisational values, culture and followership. The leadership role becomes one of facilitation and support not the current dominant “command and control” mindset.