The meaningful organizational consciousness presents a collective consciousness of a set of organized people and their development and vision to shape a successful conscious enterprise. It proposes an integrative hierarchical framework of three levels of organizational consciousness: material, social and spiritual.
Material is about making the organization financially and economically strong. It is an integral achievement where the success story streams down to meet the ocean.
In social, a group of souls must become more conscious to attain like organic self-expressive life. At the experimental level, collective consciousness conceived by an experience-based transcendent structure, shared by a group of highly organized people. A conscious enterprise works like a nervous system, which is having 100 billion neurons works together that carries electrical impulses to the brain to control the full functionality of the body.
For an individual person, in the dualistic school of consciousness where psychology predominates, mind and brain functions together. A person can live at a very narrow self-consciousness, as an atomistic individual i.e., the impressions, emotions, dreams, logical thinking, etc., where it can be exchanged with the term ‘‘awareness’’ or ‘‘experiential consciousness’’. These shared elements eventually become the basis of ideological grounds for members of a society or an organization.
Business organizations are an integral part of the markets in which they operate. An organization needs to make a choice of viewing itself as a separate entity, an atomistic player in the market or as a sub-system operating for a larger social cause.
Organizations may primarily operate at market consciousness, societal consciousness or spiritual consciousness.
To outline the social consciousness, an organization makes connections between employer-employee. It is not possible with individual efforts. At this level organization values social merit, aim for making a partnership with individual stakeholders and define success in terms of shared destiny. Generation of a shared destiny largely depends upon the corporate nervous system, which is followed by HR policies and performing corporate social responsibility. All the members inspired by a similar mission and work for achieving the purpose.
A firm may decide to build a shared destiny relationship with some outside the organization suppliers and dealers as well.
Innovation is not enough to build a sustainable organization. You need a soul.
A spiritually conscious organization focuses on facilitating its members to find meaning at their work. The employee should feel that they are contributing to a common destiny. At this level of consciousness, the organization is able to unleash the individual human power to run the corporate nervous system. It is the backbone of creativity and innovation.
A spiritually conscious organization is the one engaged in a meaningful work environment. An environment that encourages gender equality, free by race, ethnicity, religion or culture. Fortune list of best companies to work for America reaffirms that these are places where people find the work meaningful (Colvin, 2006). They feel they are contributing towards a larger cause.
Thus, spiritually conscious organizations transcend their business boundaries and are able to create meaningful relationships with the larger society. An organization, which reaches this level of consciousness, has a meaningful relationship with the community and the state.
Organizations moving from market consciousness to social consciousness achieves better integration of innovation, efficiency, equity, and equilibrium.
References:
- Journal of collective business ethics. (2008).
- Organizational Consciousness by Harrison International Ltd.
