Abstract
This chapter explores the benefits of leveraging strategic tactics incorporating holistic approaches throughout cross-functional ecosystems with a deep dive into core work-life dynamics associated with organizational effectiveness, culture transformations, and change leadership aspects impacting the organizational development (OD) discipline evolution. Businesses today are consistently undergoing rapid change, triggered by the current volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) post-pandemic state of the world. To enhance organizational efficiencies and effectiveness, astute leaders have found it imperative to align long-term evidenced-based scientific OD strategies with measurable people management and business outcomes. The key concepts in this chapter will inform best practices, deepen awareness at all levels, and establish appreciation for holistic leadership mindsets, which can address challenges such as internal aspects of employee disengagement and external aspects of customer or stakeholder dissatisfaction.
TopIntroduction
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the future of work as these unprecedented times have for the most part transformed the traditional workplace toward hybrid environments on a permanent basis within corporate America. Vázquez-de-Príncipe (2021) aligned principles of continuous organizational development (OD) improvements while investigating organizational effectiveness facets such as workplace culture leadership, change management, and sustainable culture transformations within various sectors, including nonprofit, private, public, and government. This multidisciplinary research incorporated superconscious leadership principles, which inspired a new framework of Work-Life Predictive Dynamics and informed the ideation for the Holistic Leadership Intelligence (HLQ) Model (Vázquez-de-Príncipe, 2021).
The doctoral dissertation study explored the influence of leadership and human-intelligences on impacting work-life dynamics towards fostering sustainable organizational excellence transformations. In Vázquez-de-Príncipe’s (2021) study, organizational excellence was perceived as the capacity of professional practitioners to catalyze dynamic cultural enhancements towards serving as a precursor alignment construct for establishing sustained quality performance improvements. Additionally, enterprise organizational change management was emphasized as being necessary to effectively communicate strategic business transformations with a concerted effort to mitigating the risk of resistance and to minimizing uncertainty or obstructions towards enhancement behaviors and engagements (Vázquez-de-Príncipe, 2021).
Change agents, in particular, have the critical role of anticipating resistors, analyzing the potential consequences from any negativity, and engaging the workforce to learn perspectives from the resisting person or the people asked to perform a new behavior or activity. Change professionals challenge complacency intentionally to lead-by-example for promoting the desired behavior, strategically design motivators, and courageously address the potential consequences from “culture of entitlement” behaviors often evident in highly-hierarchical “public sector with strong civil service rules and…unionized workforces” (Kendall & Bodinson, 2017, p. 111). The pandemic triggered unplanned change for the world-at-large, which exposed the lack of resiliency and adaptability within public organizations and beyond. A demonstration of the lack of resilience and adaptability was the inability to seize opportunities to influence work-life evolution positively. The investigation highlighted work-life dynamics impacted by the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) (Diefenbach & Deelmann, 2016) state of the world, incorporating the core concepts of leadership, authenticity, grit, resilience, social-emotional skills, growth intelligence, and spiritual intelligence (Vάzquez-de-Prίncipe, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Holistic Leadership Intelligence (HLQ): The dexterous consummate superconscious leadership mindset integrating spiritual, authentic, and transformational leadership styles for leading as culture catalyzers by servicing, guiding, engaging, and equipping others with social behavioral dynamics exhibited by those who can deeply connect by harnessing the spirit/light, heart/energy, mind/brain, and body/hands.
Holistic Catalyzing Culture Leadership: The leader’s ability to withstand, adapt, and thrive in the face of unprecedented shocks waves, by leveraging both external and internal perspectives to assess the organization’s financial/operational strengths, weaknesses, threats/risks, to enable rebalancing opportunities that facilitate strategic resilience, while fostering holistic positive cultures within human-centric workplaces.
Deeply Formed Work/Life Dimensionality Iceberg: The integrative model reflecting the organizational, educational, interpersonal, spiritual, and cultural multi-dimensional synergistic dynamics informed by the principles of HLQ depicting the deepest level (#1) as realizing accomplishment needs focused on ‘Me’ and “Others,’ preparing business in 4 th Industrial Revolution leadership readiness, cultivating a holistic positive climate as culture catalyzers through courageous service, and shaping possibilities of an enlightened flourishing work/life.
Spiritually Intelligent Leaders: The leader’s ultimate intellectual ability to lead oneself while influence others from a holistic place of spiritual well-being, towards fostering a sense of purpose, meaning, and connectedness within work-life dynamics through integrative experiences for building existential engagements that are transformative.
Organizational Health Factors: The hallmark identifier of healthy organizations is the flourishing cultural climate exhibited by outcomes such as high employee morale, consistent performance energy-momentum, unlimited trustworthiness, pleasant relational work-life dynamics, and adequate knowledge transfer producing conditions for positive financial implications to bottom-line derived from superior culture and energetic human performance levels.
Work-Life Predictive Hierarchical Model: The regression model outcomes of investigation with sub-variables having positive and negative relationships associated with primary scales of social skills, grit, and authentic leadership.
Spirituality at Work: The workplace norm acceptance of one’s spiritual-being as being a critical component of the whole person, which requires nurturing of the soul, recognizing values-systems, embracing dexterities, encouraging dialogues, and affirming these forces to foster ultimate intrinsic motivation for passionately driving high-performance at professional and organizational levels.