Corporate spiritual disciplines and the quest for organizational virtue

The burgeoning literature in organizational ethics points to the need for a better understanding of how to enable virtues in organizational settings. Moreover, there has been an increasing call to replace conventional management theory and practice with new approaches to managing based on virtues. We draw on a classical spiritual disciplines literature to develop a four‐phase process model that facilitates organizational virtue and moral agency. We illustrate the model, and buttress support for the sequential nature of its constituent parts, by using a four‐step “friendly disentangling” approach associated with servant leadership. We contend that practicing the four corporate spiritual disciplines serves to change the character of organizational culture and individuals in positive directions. We conclude with a discussion of how the four corporate spiritual disciplines correspond to Management 2.0 and Multistream management, and to the four classic functions of management.