Relationship between spiritual intelligence (SI) & job satisfaction (JS) in millennials

Rahul Singh, Urvashi Sharma, Jaya Chitranshi. Relationship between spiritual intelligence (SI) & job satisfaction (JS) in millennials. Cardiometry; Issue 22; May 2022; p. 223-230; DOI: 10.18137/cardiometry.2022.22.223230; Available from:

There is a global perception that millennial find reasons to turn away from traditional religious beliefs. In an age where access to any information virtually is just a click away, millennial have taken advantage of finding the answers to many difficult questions to which they are often given sugar-coated answers.

$Q spiritual intelligence synchronous processing whole brain

Intellectual intelligence serial processing left brain

emotional Intelligence parallel processing right brain

Fig. 1. Measured the workplace

• •    Intellectual intelligence: Refers to how well the person understands and implements the concepts and knowledge.

• •    Emotional intelligence refers to how well an individual can process and manage their emotions during unfavorable situations.

• •    Spiritual intelligence: It points to the capability of a person to strive for an advanced understanding of meaning and satisfaction in life.

2.1    Millennials

Since spirituality is a little difficult to grasp, it is not because only words best explain spirituality, but because spirituality does not have a fixed definition per se. Every individual observes spirituality in their way. However, for spirituality, the best approach to understand is often felt or intuited ways of knowing. With some children and young people, maybe engaging themselves in recognizing and supporting God is their way of being spiritual [3]. For some people with high self-awareness and self-control to decide when and how to react in certain situations keeping their actions and behavior completely in control is their way of being spiritual. There have been studies, which concluded that spirituality is common and natural for children of all faiths and religions.

The term that Danah Zohar came up with is ‘SI in her book ‘Rewiring the corporate brain.’ Cindy Wigglesworth states that SI is “the capability of the person to decide when to act or react with compassion and wisdom, keeping ones outer and inner peace untroubled by the circumstances” [5].

2    Review of literature

According to Gunther and Business Week, spirituality at the workplace has been a topic of discussion in many business magazines, such as the cover story for both Fortunes, as stated by Conlin. According to Nimon, the millennial generation is a set of individuals who were born between the 1980s and 1990s [6]. Those people born from 1982 to 2012 are considered millennial, as observed by Howe and Strauss. As per Fog, the workplace values for millennial include recognition, hands-on advanced technology, regular feedback, personal, professional fulfillment, and fun.

The Millennial generation students and workforce are more ambitious and require structure for their achievement-oriented goals, as studied by Behrens. This generation comes from a society where parents hold a major role in deciding their children’s careers; they do not want their children to commit the same mistakes they did or their previous generation. Due to this, today’s millennials are held to high expectations and are expected to outperform above the norm [9]. This constant pressure by society and family has made this generation think beyond prayers and preaching’s about spirituality and spiritual intelligence. SI is defined by Zohar and Marshall as a competence that the people have in order to acknowledge and resolve their difficulties and place their actions to add meaning and value to their lives to live life meaningfully. In a study, Kimberly A. Greenway shows that women scored higher in terms of spirituality and purpose of life than men. The study indicates that millennials are now exploring the purpose and meaning of life [10].

2.2    Work spirituality

Fig. 2. Work spirituality

2.3    IT and defense profession

In one of the Medicine Military journals, MacDonald et al. discuss how spirituality affects veterans’ mental health and the importance of ‘positive spiritual coping’ in improving veterans’ well-being. Job Satisfaction (JS) is often said to be an optimistic spiritual state that results from the arrangement done in the work setting, as in an evaluator study by Arches 1991 [13].

3    Research gap

The linkage of spiritual intelligence with job satisfaction is in an embryonic stage in India. There has been some development in the application of spiritual intelligence in understanding employees’ effectiveness, but this has been restricted to western countries. India is yet to explore if the employee’s efficiency can be improved by spiritual intelligence [14]. There is a dearth of research on this subject in India due to its differences in socio-economic class, culture, infrastructure, and population. Based on the fact that 75% of the global workforce is millennial and factual research is conducted to understand the SI on job satisfaction in millennial, this generation was selected.

Sector: Though there have been studies conducted in India on understanding the SI and JS in banking, hospitality, and teaching professions, there has been no research done in Defense and IT [15].

4    Research objectives

• 1.    To study the relationship between SI and JS in millennial.

• 2.    To analyze the difference between SI and JS between men and women.

6.1    Method of data collection 6.2    Sampling

5    Hypotheses

Based on the reviewed literature mentioned in the review of literature segment, following the hypothesis is formulated:

H ₁ : There is a noteworthy and positive relationship between SI and JS in millennial working in the Defense and IT field.

6    Research methodologies

The data has been collected and analyzed in the following method.

Questionnaire: For this study to measure spiritual intelligence, a reliable standardized King’s SISRI questionnaire contained 24 sets of questions. Similarly, to measure job satisfaction, a Stamp and Piedmont’s JSS questionnaire was used. A detailed description of the questionnaire has been provided in the pages ahead [16].

Figure 3, it is observed that out of 118 respondents, 79.7% were men, and 20.3% were women who work in the Defense field and Multinational Information Technology Companies. Owing to the title, all the respondents were millennial born between 1980 and 1997.

Fig. 3. Gender respondents

A figure 4 show depicts the occupation of the respondents. It is observed that the millennial were majorly from Defense and IT fields. Of 118 respondents, 66.9% of millennial were from defense, and 33.1% were from IT.

Fig. 4. Occupation in respondents

6.3    Questionnaire

A questionnaire containing 36 questions of SI and JSS was floated to collect data for the research pur- 226 | Cardiometry | Issue 22. May 2022

pose. Likert Scale rating is used where the responses varied from 5 being completely agreed and 1 completely disagreeing. Since the hypothesis and findings will be backed by statistical analysis, a well-structured questionnaire is used. A reliable standardized King’s SISRI questionnaire was used to measure spiritual intelligence, which contained 24 sets of questions. Similarly, to measure job satisfaction, a Stamp and Piedmont’s JSS questionnaire was used [18].

6.4    SISRI-24

For measuring spiritual intelligence: the SISRI-24 scale is used.

6.5    JSS

7    Results and discussion 7.1    Data analysis tool

The collected data was analyzed using Statistical Package Social Sciences Program (SPSS) and Google sheets. The survey is analyzed using the Reliability test, coefficient correlation.

The reliability test is commonly done to measure the internal consistency of the questionnaire. An ideal Cronbach’s alpha score in this test should be above 0.70. The Cronbach’s alpha score above 0.80, where the questionnaire is considered reliable to work with, is considered good and highly reliable.

Table 1 shows the Reliability test conducted on 57 items of JS and SI yielded a Cronbach’s alpha score of 0.723 and 0.886, respectively, which is more than the recommended score of 0.7 and is acceptable for the further analysis of the data, as per George and Mallery.

SI and JS were measured in men and women. The t-value came out to be 0.712 and 0.932, respectively, which is insignificant, indicating that gender plays no role in SI and JS. Therefore, there is no difference in SI and JS in men and women.

Table 1. Reliability test on SISRI and JSS

Variables	Respondents	Cronbach’s alpha score
Spiritual Intelligence	118	0.886
Job Satisfaction	118	0.723
Overall	118	0.883

Figure 5 shows respondents were asked to rate the job satisfaction survey if they like their work; 50% of the millennial agreed with the statement, implying that the nature of work plays a vital role in the workspace. In the figure above, it can be observed that 50% of the respondents feel a sense of achievement and pride from the kind of work they do.

According to Table 2 , the mean of Critical Existential Thinking, Personal Meaning Production, Transcendental Awareness, Conscious State Expansion, and Job Satisfaction was 4.23, 4.09, 3.93, 3.85, and 3.22 respectively.

In Table 3 , the result of ANOVA was significant, F (24.3, 117), p < 0.001 indicates a significant relationship between JS and SI & hence the hypothesis is proved.

Fig. 5. Job satisfaction

I sometimes feel my job is meaningless

Table 2

Descriptive statistics of SI and JS

Statistical Index	Mean	Standard Deviation
Spiritual Intelligence
Critical Existential Thinking	4.23	0.88
Personal Meaning Production	4.09	0.94
Transcendental Awareness	3.93	0.92
Conscious State Expansion	3.85	0.99
Job satisfaction
Pay	3.3284	0.56111
Promotion	3.3178	0.67831
Supervision	2.9703	0.42639
Fringe Benefit	3.1801	0.58369
Operating condition	3.2373	0.74954
Coworker	3.2966	0.55657
Nature of work	3.5996	0.54610
Communication	2.8919	0.73269

Table 3

Correlation coefficient between SI and JS in millennial

Dependent variable Predictor variable Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig. Spiritual Intelligence 2.943 1 2.943 24.355 .000b a. Dependent Variable: Job Satisfaction b. Predictors: (Constant), Spiritual Intelligence

Table 4 shows the relation between SI & variables of JS in millennial. The analysis proves that the relationship between SI and various components of JS in millennial is significant. The data indicates strength of relation between SI and the nature of work (r=0.413), pay (r=0.323), promotion (r=0.371), supervision (0.314), fringe benefit (r=0.246) and coworkers (r=0.200). Therefore, the hypothesis has been proved significant and positive.

Table 4

Coefficient Correlation between SI and various variables of JS

Dependent variable	Spiritual Intelligence
Statistical Index
Predictor variables	Correlation coefficient	Squared Correlation coefficient
Pay	0.323**	0.104
Promotion	0.371**	0.137
Supervision	0.314**	0.098
Fringe benefit	0.246**	0.060
Operating conditions	0.175	0.030
Coworkers	0.200*	0.04
Nature of work	0.413**	0.170
Communication	0.123	0.015

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

*Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

Table 7 indicates that the more the person expands their SI, the more they tend to achieve the sense of JS. The equation below shows that with one unit of increase in the beta coefficient of SI & JS increases by 0.313 units.

Table 5

Pearson’s r		Spiritual intelligence	Job satisfaction
Spiritual	Pearson correlation	1	0.417**
intelligence	Sig. (2-tailed)		0.000
	N	118	118
Job	Pearson correlation	0.417**	1
satisfaction	Sig. (2-tailed)	0.000
	N	118	118

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Table 6

Spearman’s rho		SI	JS
SI	Correlation coefficient Sig. (2-tailed) N	1.000 118	0.407** 0.000 118
JS	Pearson correlation Sig. (2-tailed) N	0.407** 0.000 118	1 118

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Table 7

Beta Coefficient of SI components to predict JS

			Un standardized Coefficients		Standard-ized Coefficient
Depen-	Pre-		B	Std.	Beta	t	Sig.
dent	dictor			Error
Variable	Variable
		(Con-	1.968	0.257		7.650	0.000
		stant)
Job	Spiritual		0.313	0.063	0.417	4.935	0.000
Satis-	Intelli-
faction	gence

Job satisfaction = Spiritual intelligence (0.313) + + Constant coefficient (1.968)

8    Conclusions

These days, human resource management is formulating strategies for increasing and developing SI. The findings above suggest that human resource managers and command authority of IT and defense forces, respectively, should have some policies to monitor and equip employees to enhance their spiritual intelligence. It has been mentioned in Sisk (2018) that high spiritual intelligence leads to high productivity, which might hold in the case of millennial in the Defense and IT professions. Therefore, there is a long way to explore SI and JS in millennial working in various other sectors to establish firm policies to develop spiritual intelligence at the workplace. With people becoming more aware of spirituality at the workplace, the future may see various creative and interactive heuristic approaches to develop and expand one’s SI at work. A detailed description of the questionnaire has been provided in the pages ahead.

9    Implications for Practice

In this study, the SI and JS of millennial employees in defense forces and IT MNCs were measured and analyzed to draw statistical conclusions about the consequences of spiritual intelligence on job satisfaction.

It is important to understand that spiritual intelligence in millennial makes them feel content at work so that the HR policies could be amended accordingly. Spiritual intelligence brings more job satisfaction and hence improved performance, leading to the achievement of the organizational goal.

10    Recommendations

This study has opened a new avenue for researchers to consider millennial from different professions like defense and IT MNCs for the underlying factors of job satisfaction. It is justified to state that spiritual intelligence leads to job satisfaction in most professions. For example, millennial from Defense Forces take up humongous challenges, which are life-threatening at times? However, their dedication and commitment to their work show that their sense of job satisfaction has emerged from spiritual intelligence and vice versa.

• •    There should be an annual survey to measure the SI of the employees to understand if spiritual intelligence in millennial makes them feel content at work.

• •    There can be support groups to help employees explore, embrace, and hone their spiritual intelligence. This support group can also advise the employees on how to handle daily conflicts.

• •    Proper communication channels should be established since the nature of work that the employee does. The supervision they get is seen to play a major role in achieving job satisfaction.