Spiritual Leadership and Organizational Engagement: A Study of Faith-Based Secondary Schools in Ogun State, Nigeria

Effective leadership is crucial in fostering a positive work environment, and in faith-based organizations, spiritual leadership plays a vital role in promoting employee involvement and actions that go beyond regular job duties to benefit the organization. This paper examined spiritual leadership as a predictor of employee engagement and organizational citizenship behaviour among workers in Ogun State faith-based secondary schools. Two hundred and eighty-seven workers were selected as samples through the stratified random sampling method. Data collection tools included: Demographic Data Form (DDF) Spiritual Leadership Scale (SLS), Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour Questionnaire (OCBQ). Frequency counts, percentage and simple linear regression analysis were used to analyze the data. Two hypotheses were formulated and tested at the 0.05 alpha level. Findings showed that spiritual leadership was a significant predictor of employee engagement (β = .214, t = 10.729, p < .0005) and a significant influence of spiritual leadership on OCB (β = .187, t = 7.336, p < .0005) in faith-based secondary schools in Ogun State. Subsequently, the study recommended that faith-based secondary schools in Ogun State should establish structured training programmes to help school leaders adopt and enhance spiritual leadership practices and should actively recognize and reward employees’ discretionary behaviours such as altruism, conscientiousness and civic virtue.