Discernment in management and organizations

ABSTRACT

Discernment integrates spiritual and religious values, wisdom, and sensibilities into decision making. What can spiritual and religious traditions of discernment contribute to management and organizations? A set of authors has responded to this question and offered initial empirical evidence. This article identifies and reviews research on discernment in management and organization studies, and clarifies the nature and location of discernment within the field. It also draws together writings on discernment from outside the field, organizes their coverage according to three units of analysis – processes, practices, and meetings – and elaborates the details of discernment within each. The literature review and conceptual development offered here sets the stage for further advances in discernment research and extending discernment in management and organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision making
• discernment
• managerial reflection
• sensemaking
• spiritual practices

Acknowledgments

Conversations with Portia Brown-Winston, Vanderlei Soela, and Jura Yanagihara contributed to my understanding of discernment in management and organizations. I thank them and two anonymous JMSR reviewers for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The timeline in Figure 1 includes all but one of these 19 references, Reis Louis (1994), which predates publications (beginning in 2004) with a primary focus on discernment in management and organizations.

2. I examined citing references listed in Scopus and Google Scholar on 15 February 2019.

3. The coverage of “making a choice of a way of life” in the second-week section of Spiritual Exercises (71–77) contains further practical guidance for discernment in decision making.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kent D. Miller

Kent D. Miller is a Professor of Management at the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management, Michigan State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His research examines strategic issue management and organizational learning and change, as well as methodological and philosophical issues in management and organization studies.