Spiritual well-being in management studies: an overview of the literature

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the level of relevance of the spiritual well-being (SWB) construct within the management field. More specifically, this paper tries to answer if SWB is regarded as a dominant or fruitful topic within the management, spirituality and religion field. Design/methodology/approach This systematic literature review drew on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Academic Academics. The collected relevant data covered the period between 1996 and 2024, given that the general assumption, as it proved to be indeed accurate, was that there would be scant literature related to the topic. On this basis, it was identified 43 scholarly texts. Findings Evidence showed that SWB has received, to some degree, little attention from the researchers, especially when one considers the relevance of the topic to employees. Furthermore, the findings of this study indicated that the majority of the studies are concentrated in the USA. Surprisingly, a small participation of the European countries (only Poland was investigated) was found in the research output by country, and still worse, no data from Latin American countries was obtained. Despite this limited result, it was identified that SWB researchers have used both quantitative and qualitative research designs in their work to elucidate intriguing aspects of this theory. Also noteworthy is that a larger number of studies of SWB are tied to the spiritual leadership theory literature by performing mediators’ roles. However, other paths can be examined, and this endeavor offered some alternatives worthy of investigation. Originality/value This study certainly contributes to the theory of SWB considering that it explored sensitive elements of a robust investigation such as a broad period of analysis, major outlets, study types, country-level output, sample features, constructs examined, theoretical functions of SWB and respective findings.