Maintaining 'respect for spirituality' in a secular work environment: a biographical account of the career-life journey of a black female practitioner of declared faith

Today’s global environment bears the mark of the beast namely, Volatility Uncertainty Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA). Hence why changes are occurring in the working lives of leaders and employees who now seek to integrate their spirituality at work. Perhaps this is due to society’s need for spiritual solutions to better respond to the turbulence triggered by the VUCA climate that has instigated societal, geopolitical and business changes; as a means to enable them to cope and survive. This argues why interest in spirituality, a term viewed as nebulous and with skepticism, is omnipresent and growing. Spirituality discourses span many issues, yet limited written works exist that explore it from an intersectionality perspective, regarding teaching spirituality in management programs or within businesses. A gap in knowledge of how spirituality impacts on the careers of e.g., women leaders of faith in secular work environments exists. This makes it difficult to ascertain how spirituality manifests in the management practice of such leaders. Furthermore, there is no substantive evidence to show that this issue is explored from the viewpoint of black-female-leaders’ who become of faith while in masculine secular environments. This chapter aims to plug these gaps by reviewing the intersectionality of discrimination regarding the sales career-life-journey of Reverend Jessica Meade .

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an chapter published in Managing VUCA Through Integrative Self-Management: How to Cope with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity in Organizational Behavior. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52231-9_6

Online ISBN: 9783319522319