Weaver & Stansbury (2014) Religion in Organizations Cognition and Behavior

Religion and Organization Theory
Religion in organizations: Cognition and behavior

Gary R. Weaver Jason M. Stansbury
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RELIGION IN ORGANIZATIONS:
COGNITION AND BEHAVIOR
Gary R. Weaver and Jason M. Stansbury

ABSTRACT
Religious institutions can affect organizational practices when employees

bring their religious commitments and practices into the workplace. But
those religious commitments function in the midst of other organizational
factors that influence the working out of employees’ religious commit-
ments. This process can generate varying outcomes in organizational
contexts, ranging from a heightened effect of religious commitment on
employee behavior to a negligible or nonexistent influence of religion on
employee behavior. Relying on social identity theory and schematic
social cognition as unifying frameworks for the study of religious beha-
vior, we develop a theoretically informed approach to understanding how
and why the religious beliefs, commitments and practices employees
bring to work have varying behavioral impacts.
Keywords: Religiosity; organizational behavior; social identity;
schema; identity salience; religious identity
Religion and Organization Theory

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 41, 65 110
Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20140000041011
65
66 GARY R. WEAVER AND JASON M. STANSBURY
Religion influences a range of phenomena that are relevant to the work-

place, from attitudes toward work in general (e.g., Parboteeah, Hoegl, &
Cullen, 2009; Weber, 1992/1930) to ethical decision making (e.g., Graafland,
Kaptein, & Mazereeuw-van der Duijn Schouten, 2006; Longenecker,
McKinney, & Moore, 2004; Parboteeah, Hoegl, & Cullen, 2008) to organi-
zational citizenship behaviors (e.g., Kutcher, Bragger, Rodriguez-Srednicki, &
Masco, 2010), as well as counterproductive behaviors like prejudice (Hill,
Cohen, Terrell, & Nagoshi, 2010). Religious leaders, religious institutions,
and individual religious adherents often devote themselves to effecting
change in their own lives and the lives of others (Smith, 1996, 1997).
However, those efforts often amount to somewhat less than their propo-
nents would expect, to the point that the hypocrisy of some religious
adherents is often cited by nonparticipating persons as a supporting reason
for noninvolvement in or objections to religion (Smith, 1997). The fact that
religious identification or involvement sometimes does not fully determine
the behavior of religious individuals points to what Chaves (2010) has called
the “religious congruence fallacy,” that is, the common but erroneous
presumption that the general behavior of religious persons will be consistent
with their ostensible religious beliefs and practices. This potential for
incongruence is not surprising, as much research outside of organization
studies in the sociology, psychology, and economics of religion indicates
that there are multiple and important individual and social outcomes
of individuals’ religious identities, and also many contextual influences on
religiously linked behavior (see reviews by, e.g., Edgell, 2012; Emmons &
Paloutzian, 2003; Sherkat & Ellison, 1999). Thus religiously related behavior
in organizations likely is a complex phenomenon, showing the same wide
variability in origins and impact as does religion in general.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, management research generally
has eschewed consideration of religion’s role in the explanation of work-
related behavior, despite a pedigree for this topic going back at least to
Weber’s classic work on Protestantism and capitalism. The reasons for this
inattention are matters of speculation; Weaver and Agle (2002) suggested
that perhaps management scholarship had become imbued with the once
taken-for-granted but increasingly contested secularization thesis, accord-
ing to which religion would inevitably decline in adherence and influence
in the face of modernization pressures. Although inevitable secularization
has long been a meta-narrative about religion as a social phenomenon
(Evans & Evans, 2008; Gorski & Altınordu, 2008), the empirical evidence
for it often has been disconfirming rather than confirming (e.g., Stark &
Finke, 2000). Weaver and Agle also noted an array of research challenges
Religion in Organizations: Cognition and Behavior 67
facing any scholar studying religion’s impact in the lives of individuals and
in work organizations specifically. King (2008) affirmed these bases for
management scholarship’s reluctance to address religion, and added that
apart from Weaver and Agle’s symbolic interactionist approach, the study
of religion in work organizations was largely atheoretical, and thereby
faced a scientific legitimacy problem (along with an opportunity for further
theoretical development). This legitimacy problem, King argued, encour-
aged scholars to focus on the somewhat related but nevertheless different,
and less explicitly theological and more affective and attitudinal, topic of
spirituality in the workplace (Hill et al., 2000). Interesting as spirituality as
a topic might be, it is not the same as religion, and in work environments
avoids some of the potentially problematic differences and conflicts that
might attach to the more formally structured, ethically obligatory, and
propositionally codified realm of much religious belief and practice.
Accordingly, our goal herein is to review multiple frameworks and find-
ings that can be relevant to understanding the impact of and influence on
religion in work organizations. In particular, we suggest that social iden-
tity theory (Stryker, 1980; Weaver & Agle, 2002; Wimberley, 1989) and
schematic social cognition (Gioia & Poole, 1984) can help to account for a
wide range of workplace religious phenomena, including incongruence of
belief and behavior. A social identity theory perspective highlights the
variation among individuals in the centrality of their religions (and other
identifiers) in their self-concepts, and the contingency of the expression of
those identities upon a range of situational social cues. The presence of
situational cues within an organization may encourage or attenuate
religious cognition, affect, and behavior, with differing influences across
individuals according to the centrality of religion (by itself, or relative to
other identities) in those individuals’ self-concepts. Our other explanatory
lens schematic social cognition accounts for variation in religiously
linked behavior by noting the presence or absence (and richness) of mental
models (i.e., schemas) that organize, label, and ascribe value to stimuli
arising in an individual’s environment. Such schemas also undergird cogni-
tive scripts, which constitute “schema-based knowledge of behavior and
behavior sequences appropriate to specific organizational situations and
contexts” (Gioia & Poole, 1984, p. 449). Individuals perform a given script
when a pattern in the flood of stimuli to which a person is exposed
corresponds to a prototype held in that person’s memory; the script then
identifies what is expected to happen in the prototypical situation, includ-
ing the appropriate actions for the focal person. Scripts may be acquired
through practice, or through observation, particularly the observation of
role models. Put simply, an individual with more, and richer, religious
schemas and scripts is likely to identify more opportunities to think, feel,
and act in religiously informed ways, and organizational contexts (both
work organizations and religious organizations) can selectively encourage
(or discourage) those behaviors by generating or amplifying (or undermin-
ing or contesting) shared schemas and scripts.
In what follows we (1) briefly delineate the phenomenon of religion from
related concepts (e.g., spirituality); (2) summarize three widely used scho-
larly approaches to religion, all of which share a common interest in religion
as a sometimes malleable source of identity and basis for cognition and
sensemaking; (3) focus more specifically on religion as a source of identity

and shaper of cognition; (4) examine how religion, as identity source and
cognition shaper, influences and is influenced by the context of work organi-
zations, with the goal of (5) better understanding the role of religion as an
influence on employee cognition and behavior.
MAPPING THE TERRAIN RELIGION

AND ITS NEAR RELATIONS
Conceptualizations of religion are many. Common to many of them is the

idea that religion involves attention to or a search for the sacred in the con-
text of a usually communal way of life (Durkheim, 1995; Emmons &
Paloutzian, 2003). The sacred in turn sometimes is parsed (with some
circularity) in terms of “the non-rational, religious and ritualistic ways of
behavior that are valued beyond whatever utility they may possess”
(Nisbet, 1993, p. 6). Weaver and Agle’s (2002) account of religion and
ethical behavior in organizations frames its topic in terms of religiosity
rather than religion, with religiosity explicated in a multidimensional
account involving identity, cognitive, behavioral, and affective role expecta-
tions, and extrinsic and intrinsic motivational stances toward those role
expectations. Thus, their account is in keeping with the growing social
scientific approaches to religion characterized as cultural and as lived reli-
gions (Edgell, 2012). The former of these (the cultural approach) recognizes
religion as a communally rooted and thus cultural basis for identity devel-
opment and sustenance, and as a venue for making sense of one’s world
and engaging with it (Smith, 1996). Religion, in this sense, provides a set of
cultural tools (Swidler, 2001) for understanding and navigating life and
accomplishing major societal or cultural tasks. The lived religions approach
emphasizes religion as ongoing social practices embedded in often-

institutionally sustained narratives which give them specific meaning and
significance, both individually and socially (Edgell, 2012). In both cases,
religion and its impact reflect a potential interaction between religion qua
institution and religion qua life experience, without fully reducing religion
to one or the other, and without limiting the institutional influences on and
of individual religious practice to those institutions formally identified as
religious (e.g., denominations) (cf. Cadge & Ecklund, 2007; Taves, 2009).
Put differently, religion provides a kind of cultural coherence that can
emerge “top-down” from elites or formal institutions, or “bottom-up”
from the institutionalized elements of everyday religious practice and the

way they provide cultural tools for, and are enacted and altered by, indivi-
duals in their daily lives (Edgell, 2012; Sherkat, 1997, 1998; Wuthnow,
2011). And this often structurational, sometimes contested process can be
influenced by a variety of contextual factors, such that the religious and the
secular interpenetrate each other (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007; Harrison,
Ashforth, & Corley, 2009; Wuthnow, 1994).
Religion’s near relations usually are presumed to include the ideas of the
sacred and the spiritual. The “sacred,” understood along the lines of
Nisbet’s observation (noted in the previous paragraph), has been treated as
a central feature of religion in a wide swath of sociological theory dating to
Durkheim. Taves’ (2009) recent research on sacralization characterizes it as
a process in which not only particular objects but also institutions are set
apart and invested with special meaning, as part of individuals’ daily efforts
to construct coherent accounts of their lives. Harrison et al. (2009), in their
study of the sacralization of elements of organizational identity, character-
ized the sacred by tracing the etymology of the term to its Latin root,
“meaning to ‘set apart,’ which commonly carries a positive connotation of
being worthy of respect or dedication by association with the transcendent”
(Harrison et al., 2009, p. 227). Hill, Pargament, Hood, McCollough,
Swyers, Larson, and Zinnbauer have described the sacred as “a person, an
object, a principle, or a concept that transcends the self. Though the Sacred
may be found within the self, it has perceived value independent of the
self” (Hill et al., 2000, p. 64). Defining the sacred as that which is set apart
as special is consistent with much current theory.
The idea of sacredness also plays a role in some important current scho-
larship in moral psychology. Specifically, moral foundations theory incor-
porates “purity/sanctity” as one of several evaluative categories that
humans intuitively recognize as having ethical weight (Graham, Haidt, &
Nosek, 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007). Haidt and coauthors explicate this
in terms of an emergent evolutionary motive away from the dirty and

demeaning and toward values and practices perceived as ennobling or
elevating, which though rooted in a biological revulsion toward objects or
practices that promote contagion of pathogens, has taken on a social-
factual significance that is not simply reducible to those evolutionary roots.
Recent and growing focus on spirituality as something arguably distinct
from religion has led to further proliferation of definitions and concepts,
especially since spirituality is an important part of many religions and
many persons’ experiences of their religions (Hill & Smith, 2010). Ashforth
and Vaidyanath sketched the relation of spirituality and religion by writing
that:
Spirituality connotes a personal connection to something subjectively meaningful and
larger than oneself … conversely, religion … tends to connote a more or less institutio-
nalized system of beliefs and practices that address spiritual matters. Thus religion
represents a more collective and fixed or organized response to desires for trans-
cendence, whereas spirituality represents a more idiosyncratic and emergent
response … Religion refers to a system of beliefs and practices that address fundamen-
tal questions about the meaning of life and one’s role in the world. (Ashforth &
Vaidyanath, 2002, p. 360)
Ashforth and Pratt suggested that in the workplace, spirituality is com-

posed of the dimensions of transcendence of self, holism and harmony (i.e.,
a sense of personal coherence), and growth (i.e., self-actualization); more-
over, it should be thought of as a fluid and idiosyncratic process through
which these three dimensions are fulfilled (Ashforth & Pratt, 2010). Note
the absence of reference to formally or informally institutionalized religion
in this account.
Whether a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality is tenable
is a matter of debate (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). Hill et al. (2000)
attempted to create a unified model of spirituality and religion by noting
that spirituality encompasses the “feelings, thoughts, experiences, and
behaviors that arise from a search for the sacred,” and that religion encom-
passes spirituality and/or a “search for non-sacred goals (such as identity,
belongingness, meaning, health, or wellness) in a context that has as its pri-
mary goal the facilitation of [spirituality]” along with “[t]he means and
methods (e.g., rituals or prescribed behaviors) of the search that receive
validation and support from within an identifiable group of people” (Hill
et al., 2000, p. 66). This definition has been adopted by some subsequent
authors (e.g., King, 2008) and seems to encompass the tension between
religion’s standardized approaches to the sacred, and spirituality’s idiosyn-
crasy. For our purposes herein, we focus upon religion rather than
spirituality because the relative specificity of belief, identification, and

practice promoted by the former provide more opportunities for theory-
building than the individually idiosyncratic belief, identification, and
practice encompassed by the latter.
THEORIES OF RELIGION’S INFLUENCE ON

INDIVIDUALS: A COMMON CORE
Religion has been shown to impact a wide range of individual cognitions,

affect, and behaviors, in a wide range of contexts. These effects are sometimes
complex, as for instance an individual’s religious affiliation leads to the for-
mation of social relationships which later provide emotional assistance or
otherwise facilitate coping with stressors (Cole & Pargament, 1999; Kelly,
1995; Koenig, 1998; Murray-Swank & Pargament, 2005; Pargament, 1990;
Pargament et al., 1992; Pargament, Koenig, Tarakeshwar, & Hahn, 2004).
The prevalence and diversity of religious effects upon cognition, affect,
and behavior, especially in light of frequent incongruence between indivi-
dual outcomes and formal religious belief and practice, has given rise to a
number of conceptions of the influence of religion in the lives of believers.
As noted above, we have chosen to focus on the social identity approach,
and its close relation, schematic social cognition. However, we also believe
that it is important to note other conceptions that have gained credence
in the social scientific literature. In particular, the “cultural” and “lived”
approaches noted above highlight the enactment of religion on the part of
individuals and groups of adherents; that enactment often occurs in con-
texts other than formal religious institutions, and in the case of the “lived
religion” approach, can be innovative in its appropriation of both religious
and nonreligious content. These are valuable for our inquiry because the
workplace is usually just such a nonreligious context, and these approaches
help to comprehend the adaptation of religious beliefs that adherents some-
times make in response to workplace challenges.
Identity Approaches
The identity-based approach (summarized in our introductory paragraphs)

emphasizes religious identity role expectations (e.g., Wimberley, 1984,
1989), and has been developed specifically for organizational contexts by
Weaver and Agle (2002). This approach has obvious relationships to

more recent identity-based scholarship on organizational behavior
(Aquino, Freeman, Reed, Lim, & Felps, 2009; Aquino & Reed, 2002; Shao,
Aquino, & Freeman, 2008) and to the possible role of religiously influenced
institutional logics in forming the identities and practices of people
(cf. Misangyi, Weaver, & Elms, 2008). Like other identity-based research,
this kind of account allows for variation in the actual impact of identity
characteristics insofar as contextual factors can influence the development
of identities and moderate their salience at any point in time (Aquino et al.,
2009; Read & Eagle, 2011; Weaver, 2006). For example, though not framed
explicitly in terms of identity models, considerable research in the psychol-

ogy and sociology of religion has considered the ways in which varying
degrees of societal pluralism influence the vitality of and participation in
religious practices (e.g., Chaves & Gorski, 2001).
Cultural Approaches
An alternative perspective in the sociology of religion, rooted in older

work by Durkheim (1995) and others, emphasizes religions as providing
cultural tools (Swidler, 2001) for achieving symbolic and other social
tasks. Discursive and other religious practices and resources provide
means for achieving such ends as sacralization (the setting apart of ele-
ments of social life) (Nisbet, 1993) or political legitimation (Bellah, 1985,
1991). Such an approach is not, however, entirely distinct from identity-
focused accounts, in that religion and religious narratives also can func-
tion as tools for helping to define identity (for individuals or groups), and
through an influence on identity can affect other social ends such as chari-
table, reformist or political goals and movements. For example, despite
the apparently recent, if sometimes rocky, marriage of evangelical
Christianity to conservative politics in America (Woodberry & Smith,
1998), social action of some form or other has been a defining characteris-
tic of English-speaking evangelical Christianity since its nineteenth century
origins (in contrast to older and/or non-English speaking forms of
Protestant Christianity); evangelicalism’s narrative of individual redemp-
tion and sanctification, and its disinterest in the institutionalized church as
the focal point of religious life, provided a schematic cultural tool for see-
ing religious identity in terms of individual action in a societal, rather
than ecclesiastical, context.
Lived Religions
Whereas the foregoing cultural approach emphasizes broader religious

norms and narratives that can influence individual behavior, the “lived
religions” approach (Edgell, 2012) is a more “bottom-up” approach that
considers how religious practices and beliefs are adapted by people in their
particular situations, which sometimes might reference conventional institu-
tionalized religion, but other times be distinct from it, or reflect the influ-
ence of other, nonreligious situational factors. This approach, in effect,
treats religion as a practical activity on its own, valuable for navigating life
and malleable in the hands of persons, and “not coterminous” with either
institutional religion or pure religious experience (Cadge & Ecklund, 2007;
Edgell, 2012, p. 13). Importantly, however, this practical activity can have
strong impacts upon people, creating “deep, durable schemas and disposi-
tions to act” (Edgell, 2012, p. 15), affecting a person’s abilities, goals and
values (Winchester, 2008).
A Common Core: Identity, Schematic Cognition, and Scripted Behavior
All three of these perspectives are linked, however, by the way in which
they see religion embedded in persons’ identities through cognitive sche-
mas and behavioral scripts (or what Edgell refers to as “dispositions to
act”). But they address different elements of that process of embedding
and influence. The more top-down, cultural approach in effect considers
the way religions, like institutional logics, create repertoires of cognition
and behavior for individuals to adopt (either consciously, as in a conver-
sion event, or unconsciously, in the case of taking for granted the reli-
gious outlook of one’s youth or peers). But cultural and institutional
influences are not determinative; individuals can borrow from them syn-
cretistically and piecemeal to achieve individual and social ends, and so
the “bottom-up” lived religions approach emphasizes that process of
navigating and negotiating life via the resources religion provides. But in
each case the end result is an influence on individual identities and the
internalized cognitive schemas and emotional and behavioral scripts that
help to constitute a person’s sense of “who I am” and “what is expected
of me,” and thus provide an influence (among others) on individuals’
behaviors.1
RELIGIOUS IDENTITY, COGNITION, AND BEHAVIOR
In what follows we outline a broad theoretical approach to understanding

how religion relates to behavior, emphasizing the role of religion in gener-
ating schematic/scripted thinking and action, and including identity as a
category of cognitive schema. Following that, we look at multiple implica-
tions of this general account for particular types of behavioral phenomena
in organizations. We begin by summarizing some of the general features
of religion and its link to behavior as indicated across the different
approaches noted above: that religions, and religious identification, define
affective, cognitive, and behavioral expectations for people; that religious

identification has affective, cognitive and behavioral impacts that range
beyond the formal religious role expectations proffered by religious insti-
tutions and the actors who play important formal roles within those insti-
tutions (e.g., clergy); that individual adherents can be active agents in the
development, explication and implementation of their own religious com-
mitments; that therefore there is a potentially recursive relationship
between macro-sociological logics of religion (and the resources created by
and supportive of those logics) and the actions and thinking of practi-
tioners of particular religions; and that religious actors will not only reflect
the influence of religion on them but will, in effect, use religion to accom-
plish ends within the social contexts in which they live and work. The
common theme through all of this is the link of religion to identity, and
the manifestation of that link through schematic cognition, scripted beha-
vior, and negotiated degrees of conformity to (and sometimes changes in)
religious role expectations.
Table 1 lists some representative studies considering religion’s relation to
cognition, affect, and behavior, and thus indicates the wide range of
impacts religion can have.
Religious Identity, Identity Salience, and Behavior
Identity often is characterized as being a deeply embedded sense of self

linked to some set of identifiable behaviors (Erikson, 1964). Identities are
relatively deep and enduring cognitive structures embodying an internalized
set of traits, alongside more surface level, visible behaviors that manifest
those underlying traits (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Reed & Aquino, 2003).
Aquino and Reed describe these two sides of identity as “internalization”
and “symbolization.” Although their focus is on moral identity, one can
Table 1. Representative Empirical Studies of Religious Influences upon

Cognition, Affect, and Behavior.
Cognition
Ability to cope with cognitive Pancer, Jackson, Hunsberger, Pratt, and Lea
complexity (1995)
Attitudes against risk Liu (2010); Miller (2000)
Deference toward authority Blogowska and Saroglou (2011)
Framing of suffering Shweder et al. (1997)
Moral identity Vitell et al. (2009)
Perceived value dissimilarity Cunningham (2010)
Prejudice Hill et al. (2010)
Affect
Emotional regulation Hill and Hood (1999); Smilde (2007); Stark and
Glock (1968); Watts (1997); Winchester (2008)
Gratitude Emmons and Paloutzian (2003); McCullough,
Emmons, and Tsang (2002); Winchester (2008)
Hope Koenig, McCullough, and Larson (2001)
Humility Winchester (2008)
Self-worth Schieman, Bierman, and Ellison (2010)
Behavior
Charitable giving Peifer (2010); Winchester (2008)

Coping (Functional and Dysfunctional) Pargament et al. (1992)
Forgiveness Emmons and Paloutzian (2003)
Humility Emmons and Paloutzian (2003), Winchester (2008)
Inhibition of deviance Carpenter and Marshall (2009), Tittle and Welch
(1983); Welch et al. (1991)
Modesty Winchester (2008)
Risk aversion Liu (2010); Miller (2000)
Temperance Smilde (2007), Winchester (2008)
find similar internal/external distinctions in studies of the way religion plays

a role in people’s lives (e.g., Smilde, 2007; Winchester, 2008), focusing on
cognitive schemas (i.e., internalization as part of the self) and external
behaviors that, in Aquino and Reed’s terms, symbolize the identity.
Importantly, the external side of this can be a venue of negotiation in
which religion is used as a tool for accomplishing social acts, rather than
merely as reflecting deep cognitive frames and attendant dispositions to
action and affect. Internal and external elements of identity do not necessa-
rily cohere in all situations. With regard to religion specifically, some
research has identified how varying mixtures of internal cognitive
commitment and external behavioral observance occur. For example, a

demographic study of “fuzzy fidelity” in Europe by Storm (2009) finds that
alongside the presence of individuals who identify with a religion and also
engage in visible actions harmonious with that religion (e.g., formal partici-
pation in it), many individuals also display either “believing without
belonging” (i.e., cognitive internalization without behavioral manifestation)
or “belonging without believing” (i.e., clear behavioral manifestation with-
out cognitive commitment).
Identities, including religious identities, typically are formed through life
experiences in interaction with other persons. Thus it is no surprise that
various elements of role theory (Katz & Kahn, 1978) and social structural
symbolic interactionism (Burke, 1980; Hoelter, 1985; Stryker, 1980;
Stryker & Serpe, 1982), along with social identity concerns generally, have
figured in efforts to understand the development of and behavioral implica-
tions of religious identities (e.g., Cunningham, 2010; King, 2008; Vitell
et al., 2009; Weaver & Agle, 2002; Wimberley, 1984, 1989). Through these
interactions individuals learn the cognitive (belief-oriented), affective, and
behavioral expectations attendant to particular religious frameworks,
whether through informal encounters with others, formal intra-religious
teaching, religious proselytization, or from larger cultural/social influences
of particular religious institutional logics.
Key to understanding the varying impact of religious identity, and the
potential divergence of internalized and externally symbolic elements of
that identity, is the process by which identities religious and other
vary in salience over time. Role expectations from different aspects of a
person’s life (e.g., parent, employee, citizen, religious believer, etc.),
whether manifested in cognitive, affective or behavioral ways, can conflict.
Situational factors can make one or another identity more or less salient
from time to time. Thus identities, including religious identities, can be
positioned in salience relationships (Davidson & Knudsen, 1977; Hoelter,
1985; Stryker, 1980; Stryker & Serpe, 1982). Stronger identity salience,
ceteris paribus, will lead to greater conformity to the expectations that go
along with a particular identity, including religious identity (Weaver &
Agle, 2002; Wimberley, 1989). Organizational contexts, however, provide
multiple influences on identity, leading to variation in religious identity sal-
ience (Weaver & Agle, 2002) and to potential tension and conflict among
the varied social identities that individuals (alone and collectively) bring to
the workplace (Chrobot-Mason, Ruderman, Weber, & Ernst, 2009). And if
we recognize that identity is not a unitary notion but multidimensional,
with the potential for divergence between cognitively internalized and
externally symbolized religious identity (as in the case of “fuzzy fidelities”

(Storm, 2009)), the sources and nature of variation in identity-driven
religious practice become even more complex than simple variations in
salience.
Religiously Formed Schemas and Scripts
Religions often include behavioral guidelines or requirements (Glock, 1959,

1962; Glock & Stark, 1965; Stark & Glock, 1968; see also Verbit, 1970), and
so stronger levels of self-identification with a religion should, ceteris paribus,

lead to behavior more in conformity to those particular guidelines and
requirements (e.g., Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993). The “ceteris paribus”
clause in the foregoing sentence, however, should be read in a very expansive
way; much can influence and intervene in the process, as will be discussed
later. Moreover, religions vary in the extent to which they make aspects of an
adherent’s religious status (e.g., institutional rank, life after death, etc.) depen-
dent upon one’s behavior in the present. Thus particular religious beliefs, to
the extent they form a salient part of one’s identity, might make behavior in
accord with religious guidelines more or less relevant religiously, thus affect-
ing the formation of intentions to act in accord with those guidelines.
Religious beliefs, and the language in which they are framed, can gener-
ate cognitive schemas; people steeped in a particular religious tradition and
in its beliefs have access to a particular way of framing experience (e.g.,
“natural disaster” vs. “act of God,” or suffering vs. cleansing, Shweder,
Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997). Such variance in available religious
schemas can yield differences in awareness (e.g., of ethically pregnant situa-
tions); for example, Weaver and Agle (2002) suggested that someone
steeped in Roman Catholic teachings about fair prices and fair wages might
see an ethical issue in certain business practices where someone else might
simply see “what the market will bear” (p. 83).
Affective role expectations are also common in religions for expres-
sions of guilt, shame, hope, joy, empathy, etc. (cf. Haidt, 2003; e.g.,
Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007; Watts, 1997). Such affective states can
affect perception and scripted behavior (Oatley, 1992; Phelps, 2006).
Religiously generated affect thus could affect the development of intentions
to address an ethical problem (e.g., motivation by moral anger), or generate
a more honest assessment of one’s own moral failings (Dobson & Franche,
1989), or make one more aware of and responsive to morally laden situa-
tions due to feelings of guilt over prior moral failures.
Along with affective role expectations, religious participation can bring

with it behavioral scripts; religious discourse often takes narrative form,
and those narratives often are structured around particularly hallowed
religious actors and their deeds. Thus, Weaver and Agle argued that reli-
gious adherents have access to a set of behavioral scripts that can lead
directly to particular behaviors, even without mediating steps such as con-
scious judgment formation. Importantly, religiously generated schemas
can be deeply entrenched, not only supporting forms of religiously influ-
enced action but themselves being supported by religious practices
(Winchester, 2008).
Breadth and Malleability of Religious Identity, Schemas, and Scripts
The cognitive, affective, and behavioral influences noted above can also
have broad effects, as religious practices (i.e., behavior) can reinforce cogni-
tive and affective states (Bandura, 1986), even encouraging a deeply
entrenched habitus (Bourdieu, 1977; see Asad, 1993; Mahmood, 2005;
Winchester, 2008). So although ritual behavior might seem narrowly
focused and distinctively religious in its ends, it can serve to reinforce some
of the cognitive or affective aspects of religious self-identification, making
it more likely that they influence behavior. Participation in group ritual
also enhances identification with the group, and this kind of binding can
further enhance religious identity and its salience at a given point in time
(cf. Haidt, Seder, & Kesebir, 2008). Weaver and Agle (2002) argued that
religious devotionalism, even if private, can help to entrench cognitive and
affective religious role expectations, thus indirectly having behavioral
impacts. Similarly, expectations for particular religious experiences some-
times can extend in influence beyond the narrowly religious, as when indivi-
duals experience all of life as sacred in some way seeing work as a
calling, for example (Davidson & Caddell, 1994). Notions of the sacred are
closely linked to ideas of purity, and thus the sacralization of phenomena
such as employment relations and work organizations (Harrison et al.,
2009) likely leads to greater sensitivity to and behavioral response to
perceived violations, or profaning, of more sacralized aspects of life, lead-
ing in turn to efforts to purify such profaned venues (Harrison et al., 2009;
Weaver & Brown, 2012).
Attention to particular practices of work-faith integration indicates
how malleable conventional formal characterizations of religion are. Some
effort has focused on the ways by which individuals bring their religious
commitments into play in the workplace (notably by Miller, 2007, but also
see other treatments of faith-work integration, such as Lynn, Naughton, &
VanderVeen, 2009, 2011; Nash, 1994; Nielsen, 1996). (This work to some
extent parallels the earlier work on dimensions of religious role expecta-
tions conducted by Glock & Stark, 1965). Thus, Miller identified four
forms of work-faith integration and adaptation among people of varying
western and nonwestern religions: an ethics-oriented form of religiously
inspired behavior at work; an expressive form of religious behavior at work
(e.g., talk about one’s religion or religious outlook with co-workers); an
experiential form (e.g., meaningfully interpreting one’s work experience in
religious terms, such as being a divine calling or a form of divinely expected

service); and an enrichment form (whereby religious involvement leads to
workplace adaptation, as when religion provides strength for coping with
workplace stress, or defines work as an opportunity for personal spiritual/
religious growth). Each of these specific forms of work-faith integration
can be seen as involving one or more of experiential (e.g., religious action
or emotion oriented, as in the case of Miller’s “expression” or “ethics” cate-
gories), belief related (e.g., interpretive schema oriented, as in the case of
Miller’s “experience” category, which he frames in terms of beliefs about
the meaningfulness or value of one’s work), or quasi-private practices (e.g.,
accepting work stressors as religious growth opportunities, as in the case of
Miller’s “enrichment” category”).
In accordance with the “lived religions” approach we described earlier,
religious adherents can be active agents in the construction of forms of
religious expectations and practices. For example, schemas encouraged by
membership in a particular religion nevertheless might be applied or acted
upon in somewhat different ways by individuals in their various situa-
tions. The religious schemas themselves might be as likely to be revised
or influenced by an individual’s work experiences as work experiences
might be perceived or reinterpreted in light of those schemas (Cadge,
Levitt, & Smilde, 2011). Thus, dichotomies of sacred and secular, and
assumptions that influences flow from religious institutions to religious
individuals rather than vice versa, are problematic. Religious adherents,
for example, can use their “secular” settings for constructing particular,
perhaps idiosyncratic forms of religious practice and engagement, and in
the process create new understandings of or approaches to religion (see,
e.g., Cadge’s studies of religiously negotiated behavior in academic medi-
cal centers, summarized in Cadge et al., 2011; see also Smilde, 2007;
Winchester, 2008 for additional examples of this kind of “lived religion”
process).
Identity Salience Variation and the Moderation of Religious Influence
Even deeply embedded religious identities, and their attendant schemas,

scripts, and role expectations, can vary in salience, with that variation in
turn having implications for behavior and cognition. All else being equal,
greater religious identity salience should lead to behavior, thought and
affect more in harmony with the role expectations attached to that iden-
tity, and with the cognitive schemas and behavioral scripts characteristic
of that religious stance. Given identity’s strong tie to the depth and fre-
quency of interaction with others, it’s not surprising that the kind of reli-
giously based or religiously identified relationships a person has influences

the degree to which that person’s religion affects behavior (e.g., Welch,
Tittle, & Petee, 1991). But context influences not just the content of iden-
tities but also identity salience. For example, the absence or dissolution
of competing, secular outlooks can render religious categories more sali-
ent (Tittle & Welch, 1983).
Weaver and Agle (2002) noted a number of ways in which organiza-
tional context can influence religious identity salience. For example, for-
mal and informal organizational commitments can compete with religious
commitments, leading to greater salience for one’s organizational identity
and attendant roles than for religious identity and its roles. Deeper and
more widespread interpersonal commitments based on organizational
identity likely will make that identity more salient and influential; in that
case, even if religious identity remains influential to a degree, it might
only be so with regard to relatively private religious phenomena (such as
religious reinterpretations of the significance of one’s work, or religious
coping behavior in response to workplace stressors). Weaver and Agle
argued that, paradoxically, organization members in higher status posi-
tions would be less likely to act on religious identity despite having more
formal power to do so, given how much the identities of high organiza-
tional status persons are linked to their organizational positions. (Reed,
Aquino, & Levy (2007) later found this situation to hold in the different
context of moral, rather than religious, identity.) In addition, Weaver and
Agle noted that the strength of organizational cultural norms and pre-
sence of co-religionists can influence religious identity salience, and that
religious behavior by an individual can contribute to changing cultural
norms or to the revealing of otherwise closeted co-religionists, thereby
reinforcing an organizational context conducive to further increases in
religious identity salience.
ORGANIZATIONAL INFLUENCES ON RELIGIOUS

IDENTITY, SCHEMAS, AND SCRIPTS
The result of the foregoing review of theory and research on religion’s

relationship to cognition, affect and behavior should indicate that there
are multiple routes to and influences on what Chaves calls “religious
congruence” that is, congruence of a religion’s formal and informal role
expectations to any individual adherent’s behavior, cognition and affect.
More importantly, however, there are multiple means by which congruence
can “fail” or get redirected, or even changed in meaning, as both individual
actors and their larger social settings jointly influence the perception, inter-
pretation, and working out of religious expectations.
Organizational contexts have considerable influence upon the schematic
cognition, identities, and scripted behaviors of their members, and on the
process of sensemaking in the face of conflicts and ambiguities affecting
favored schemas and scripts. Thus, organizational contexts should affect,
and be affected by, the religious schemas, scripts and identities that
employees bring to the workplace.
Fig. 1 illustrates, at a high level of generality, the relationships among
religious identity and related schematic cognitions, and behavior in
organizations.
Organizational
Context Identity
(e.g. Presence of Salience
Coreligionists in the
Workplace)
Religious Cognitions and

Identity & Behaviors in
Religiously- Organizations
Formed (e.g. Favorable
Attitudes toward
Related Work, Risk
Schematic Aversion, or
Cognitions Destructive
Conformity)
Fig. 1.
Variation in Identity Salience, Schemas, and Scripting
Prior research has proposed or identified a number of contextual influences

upon religious behavior in the workplace, particularly relationships, prac-
tices, and symbols. Table 2 summarizes a number of empirical findings
regarding those influences, as well as some possible future research, as will
be discussed below.
Weaver and Agle (2002) proposed that (a) the number and importance
of an individual’s commitments to other employees who are invested in
an organization’s dominant ethos will likely increase that individual’s sub-
scription to that ethos, whereas commitments to co-religionists in the

workplace will enhance the salience of an individual’s religious identity;
(b) a strong organizational culture is likely to crowd out competing
values, whereas a weak or fragmented one creates opportunities for indi-
viduals to use alternative schemas, including religion, to give consistency
to their experience, and (c) the presence of material symbols or other arti-
facts of religious culture may signal an individual’s religiosity to others,
prompting those others to treat that individual differently according to
their religion; such symbols may also remind individuals of their own
identities, thereby triggering relevant scripts and schemas (Weaver &
Agle, 2002). These three points are also reflected elsewhere in the litera-
ture; similarly to the first point above, Chaves (2010) theorized that reli-
giously formed thought and action will be more likely when individuals
submit to the social control of a community of co-religionists in which
they are embedded. Similarly to Weaver and Agle’s second point above,
Ashforth and Pratt theorized that working for a directive organization
(Ashforth & Pratt, 2010) might also trigger or encourage reliance upon
religiously formed scripts and schemas.
Limited empirical research also has been consistent with some of these
ideas. Lynn et al. (2011) found that an organization’s size reduces indivi-
duals’ agreement with a set of survey items measuring the presence of
religious schemas pertaining to work; this is consistent with Weaver and
Agle’s theory, insofar as a larger workplace is likely to entail more com-
mitments to a larger and more diverse array of fellow employees (thereby
diluting relations with co-religionists). Peifer’s (2010) finding that the pro-
pensity of individuals in Christian congregations to donate a larger pro-
portion of their income to the church is predicted by their sense of
solidarity with the church (and with the self-reported importance of their
religion to themselves) also is consistent with the theory: stronger connec-
tions with co-religionists increase the salience of religious identity, which
Religion in Organizations: Cognition and Behavior
Table 2. Representative Empirical Studies of Organizational Influences upon Religious Behavior.

Coreligionists and religious practices in the workplace increase agreement with workplace-related Lynn et al. (2011)
religious schemas
Organizational sensebreaking and sensegiving inculcates religious schemas Pratt (2000)
Organization size reduces agreement with workplace-related religious schemas Lynn et al. (2011)
Potential Organizational Influences Upon Religious Behavior
Do workplace reminders of religious identity (e.g., religious clothing, devotional activities, etc.) prime religious scripts and schemas?
Does intra-organizational support for religious expression facilitate activation, enactment, and retention of religious scripts and schemas?
Does less organizational use of religious language diminish the salience of religious identity for organization members?
Does expression of some religion in the workplace prime schemas and scripts for that religion alone, or for all religions represented in a
given workplace?
Is religiously formed behavior subject to positive, or negative, ampliative spiraling?
Are boundary-spanners who face equivocality or conflict with religious schemas and scripts influenced to enact or discard religious
schemas based on organizational sensegiving?
Do religious individuals engage in tempered radicalism in order to maintain their religious identities in ambivalent or hostile
organizations?
Are religious schemas reinterpreted in the event that organizational sacralization is contested?
83
in turn promotes beliefs and behaviors that are consistent with that iden-
tity. Pratt (2000) found that well-defined patterns of sensebreaking and
sensemaking among Amway distributors (affiliates of a network market-
ing company) incorporated significant religious content, and resulted in
many Amway distributors adopting religious beliefs, as might be expected
in a strongly religious organizational culture. Lynn et al. also found that
religious sermons and classes in the workplace, spiritual disciplines includ-
ing prayer and meditation, and mentors and role models in the workplace
all increased agreement, which also seems consistent with Weaver and
Agle’s theory in that relationships with co-religionists, and the presence
of religious cultural artifacts, should increase the salience of religious

identity.
Religious relationships, practices, and symbols also can function as psy-
chological primes, reminding individuals of the relevance of certain sche-
mas and scripts at a particular point of decision making, and increasing the
salience of a religious identity in a particular situation. Carpenter and
Marshall (2009), for example, found that even for self-identified Christian
individuals with high intrinsic religiosity, priming by reading Bible passages
increased behavior that accorded with their own statements of the moral
course of action in a variation on the dictator game. In general, then, work-
place reminders of religious identity, be they religious clothing, sacred texts,
devotional activities, religious language, or religiously identified relation-
ships, all remind participants of their religious identities and attendant cog-
nitive scripts and schemas, and thereby prompt religiously congruent
cognitions and behaviors.
Not all possible contextual influences on religious schemas and identities
have been supported clearly in the empirical literature. Lynn et al. (2011)
found that contextual factors including the number of hours worked (which
presumably create conflicts with religious activities and the roles that those
activities express) and professional status (and the autonomy that is pre-
sumed to be its corollary) had no effect upon individuals’ agreement with
their survey items measuring the presence of religious schemas pertaining
to work. Chaves and Gorski (2001) found that religious pluralism (mea-
sured as the diversity of religious affiliations reported in a geographic area)
does not consistently bolster religious participation (as in the case of the
nations of Northern and Western Europe during the Reformation, or in
the United States in recent history), but rather that it sometimes coincides
with diminishing religious participation (as is the case in Northern and
Western Europe, and Canada, today); the same mixed results might hold
for the diversity of religious expression in large work organizations. In the
workplace, pluralism will not necessarily prompt or suppress religious belief

or behavior, nor will individuals who enjoy greater autonomy necessarily
think or act in more religious ways.
Sensemaking and Religious Schemas
As noted earlier, contextual influences on religiously formed behavior can

be understood within a schematic framework of social cognition that is
familiar to scholars of organizational behavior, including script processing
(Gioia & Poole, 1984) and sensemaking (Maitlis, 2005; McKee, Mills, &
Driscoll, 2008; Weick, 1979; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005).
Automatic script processing corresponds to the internalized and habitual
responses that lend themselves to religious congruence. Moreover, corre-
sponding religiously scripted behavior can further entrench religious frame-
works and identity, as behavior and cognition mutually reinforce each
other. But religious scripts often can be narrow in scope, resisting applic-
ability beyond conventionally defined religious venues and situations.
These habits are generally narrow in their scope, pertaining primarily to
cognition, affect, and behavior in explicitly religious contexts (Chaves,
2010), and extensions outside of the scope of the religious contexts in which
they are forged can be difficult. Thus, Darley and Batson (1973) found that
seminarians on their way to make a presentation on the parable of the
Good Samaritan (i.e., about helping an injured stranger in need) were no
more likely than peers in a control group to help a moaning person
slumped on the side of the path (the exact situation captured in the Good
Samaritan story). However, such extensions beyond conventionally reli-
gious settings are not impossible, and in fact depend on the generality of
the habits inculcated. Winchester (2008) found that Muslim converts at an
Islamic center in Missouri described their progressive adoption of the
habits of a “good Muslim,” like Ramadan fasting or dressing modestly, as
being self-reinforcing practices that changed their thinking, feeling, and
acting toward a range of life situations. In general, then, although quasi-
religious categories of thinking and acting might be transferable to organi-
zational contexts (e.g., “servant leadership,” “stewardship”), this is not
guaranteed, and likely will depend on the extent to which the organiza-
tional context is supportive of such transference, providing triggers for reli-
gious schemas and scripts, and legitimating their applicability when
triggered. Thus, the salience of a person’s religious identity is contingent
upon a number of situational factors.
Scripted behavior and schematic thinking is not always straightforwardly

automatic, however. In particular, where a less-than-typical set of stimuli
problematizes automatic performance of a script, sensemaking occurs
(Weick et al., 2005). Sensemaking describes the social-cognitive response of
an individual or a group of individuals to a situation of equivocality, in
which the available information may be plausibly interpreted as many (or
no) recognized patterns. Recognition that the situation is an exception, and
requires something other than an automatic response, is met with some
interpretation of the available information: it is assimilated to available
schemas. One of those schemas is then selected and shared, either by per-
forming an associated script, or by discussing it with others. If that schema

is not disconfirmed by its own consequences, then it is retained for
further action. Moreover, sensemaking often is retrospective; individuals
are often concerned with justifying their own actions and beliefs, such
that they are motivated to remain consistent with past statements (Weick
et al., 2005). And the influences on sensemaking are varied prior
experiences and familiarity with a present situation type; communication
quality among persons involved in a sensemaking episode; stress or other
aspects of the sensemaking situation; relationships with others, etc.
(Weick, 1993). But in general, the confirmation or disconfirmation of reli-
gious scripts and schemas through commitments to co-religionists, or to
other organizational members who subscribe to the organization’s domi-
nant ethos, respectively (Lynn et al., 2011; McKee et al., 2008; Weaver &
Agle, 2002), suggests that sensemaking occurs when individuals are faced
with the opportunity to respond to equivocal situations using religious
(or nonreligious) schemas or scripts. Religious schemas and scripts are
retained if they win the confirmation of significant others, and jettisoned
if they do not; thus, the salience of a person’s religious identity in a given
situation is contingent in part upon the social feedback its enactment
receives.
Organization Level Processes
Organization level phenomena such as organizational cultural norms,

language, and formal policies clearly can influence the likelihood that
religious behaviors are manifested in organizations and thereby have
further social cognitive influences on individual members’ behaviors. But
such contextual influences on religious behavior in organizations can be
recursive, reinforcing certain organization-level tendencies that are
supportive or not vis-à-vis religious identity and schemas. Scheitle’s

(2009) study of the organizational self-descriptions provided in tax forms
of Christian nonprofits receiving government funding offers an example
of this kind of process. He suggests that although the introduction of
government funding coincided with a shift away from religious language
over time for only an insignificant number of organizations, there was
some reason to suspect that for some religious nonprofits, self-imposed
limits on explicit religious identity, the professionalization of manage-
ment, and access to government funding formed a web of mutual influ-
ences. If normal processes of institutionalization hold, then as some
(perhaps high-profile) organizations adopt particular stances vis-à-vis reli-

gious identification, it will become increasingly normative for others to do
so as well. But because language is important as a means of constructing,
transmitting, and making salient religious identity (Wuthnow, 2011), if a
religious organization engages in less use of religious language, the sal-
ience of religious identity for its members (and for other social actors
influenced by the organization) should decrease in turn.
FUTURE RESEARCH ON ORGANIZATIONAL

INFLUENCES UPON RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION
Theories of schematic social cognition can be used to explore a number of

workplace identity-construction phenomena relating to religion. It is likely
that religion in the workplace is enacted on an ongoing basis, and therefore
that the relationships reviewed above are dynamic rather than static.
Future research may examine the progressive influence of various predic-
tors of religious manifestation and expression, and the recursive effects of
religious manifestation and expression themselves. Moreover, an especially
interesting subset of religious dynamism includes the problematization and
adaptation of religious identity in the organizational context. Religious
individuals may face situations in the workplace in which the salience of
their religious identities, and/or the applicability of their existing schemas,
are equivocal. Locally novel responses that change the terms of religious
manifestation and expression in the workplace are therefore also interesting
topics for future research, especially as they illuminate both the lived nature
of religion and the potentially surprising influence of religion upon other
organizational phenomena through sensemaking, tempered radicalism, or
even moral imagination.
Ampliative Spiraling of Religiosity
The potential for visible manifestation and expression of religious outlooks

to increase the salience of religious schemas and identity could, in theory,
lead to situations of ampliative “spiraling” of religiously formed behavior
in the workplace. That is, some initial degree of religious expression could
enhance the salience of religion, leading to greater levels of religiously
formed behavior by individuals, leading to further increases in salience,
and so on. Thus, religiously expressive workplaces might not be static phe-
nomena, but rather dynamic with regard to variation in the extent of
religion’s influence on workplace behavior. Similarly, restraint on manifes-

tations and expressions of religion might reduce salience, thereby making
actively religious behavior less likely, thereby further reducing salience, and
so on. An interesting open question in this regard, however, is whether reli-
gious identity salience is increased by exposure to any kind of religious
expression in the workplace, or rather, exposure only to religiously similar
outlooks; that is, does some degree of open manifestation of a particular
religion (e.g., the presence of Christian devotions, Bible study groups, or
even chaplains in some workplaces, or the presence of Hindu or Sikh reli-
gious attire, symbols, and dietary practices in other workplaces) render reli-
gion more salient for all religious employees in the organization, or only
for those who share the openly manifested religion? And does it matter
whether the expressed religion is presumed to be majority or minority sta-
tus, or supported (or not supported) by powerful organizational actors? Do
highly frequent expressions, or high levels of diversity of religious expres-
sion, enhance religious salience or instead serve to trivialize religion in
some way?
Triggers of Intentional Religious and Nonreligious Sensemaking
Chaves (2010) argued that behavior might be more congruent with religious
belief if individuals intentionally consider the implications of their beliefs.
But what kinds of situations encourage that kind of intentional attention?
Will religious individuals be more likely to behave according to their beliefs
when faced with the kinds of equivocal situations that encourage active
sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005), thereby leading to the selection of reli-
giously informed scripts? Or will the ambiguities and tensions that prompt
sensemaking lead organization members away from religious frameworks
of thought and action? Boundary-spanners in certain organizations may
frequently face such opportunities for sensemaking, because their own

work presents them with considerable equivocality. Many organizations
are explicitly religious, particularly in the education, health care, and
media/publishing sectors, and some expend considerable resources socializ-
ing their new members (Ashforth & Pratt, 2010; Pratt, 2000). Other organi-
zations succeed in sacralizing themselves or their purposes, often without
reference to any theology (Harrison et al., 2009). Therefore, the common
adversarialism of work in collections, labor relations, or the office of the
general counsel may all provide rich sites for the study of such sensemak-
ing, especially in light of differences in organizational sensegiving; of parti-
cular interest may be the extent to which schemas and scripts anchored in
an extraorganizational religious commitment are retained in the face of
pressing task needs and institutionalized norms. Religious individuals
working in billing for a religious hospital, who may regularly pray
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” may experience consider-
able cognitive dissonance over the decision to turn medical debts over to a
collections agency; their resolution of that tension may illustrate the factors
influencing the retention (or nonretention) of religiously grounded schemas
over others. Such tensions point to the value of considering how the work-
place itself provides a venue for renegotiating and reinterpreting the tenets
of one’s religious identity, such that influences proceed not merely from
religions to the workplace behavior of their adherents, but from the work-
place, through employees, to the beliefs, structures, and practices of their
religions (Cadge et al., 2011).
Tempered Radicalism
The experiences of tempered radicals (Meyerson, 2001; Meyerson & Scully,

1995) may also provide clues to the maintenance and adaptation of reli-
gious identity in unreceptive organizations. “‘Tempered Radicals’ are indi-
viduals who identify with and are committed to their organizations, and are
also committed to a cause, community, or ideology that is fundamentally
different from, and possibly at odds with, the dominant culture of their
organization” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995, p. 586). The tension between their
personal and professional identities can enable them to be both productive
members of their organizations, and constructively critical advocates of
change; however, it can also cause stress and frustration, and eventually
prompt those individuals to disregard one identity or the other. Individuals
with strong religious commitments, who feel that those commitments are
not respected or welcomed in their workplaces, may engage in a number of

techniques for maintaining the salience of their religious identities inside
and even outside the workplace (depending on the degree of role or identity
conflict they experience). For instance, some devout Jews, Muslims, or
Christians working for some media production companies may experience
some tension over perceived involvement in entertainments portraying
morally dubious practices (e.g., sexual objectification, drug use, etc.). Such
persons, however, could simultaneously anchor their personal identity and
cope with the stress of the tension they experience by forming relationships
and networks with like-minded co-religionists, either within or outside of
their employer or industry. They also might formulate creative strategies

for bringing their religiously rooted schemas to bear in a secular workplace,
thereby exercising moral imagination (Werhane, 1999). Alternatively, they
might engage some techniques for reducing the salience of their religious
identities in the event of unwanted conflict; the neutralization technique of
“balancing the ledger” (Anand, Ashforth, Joshi, & Martini, 2004) might
employ charitable donations outside of the workplace to offset socially
damaging behavior within it. These tensions may even exist in relatively
religious organizations, if tempered radicals experience their religious
identity in a digressive form from the dominant one. Research on religious
tempered radicals may illuminate (a) the maintenance of sacred identities in
the face of disconfirming sensegiving, (b) the moral imagination (Werhane,
1999) that importing schemas and scripts from another identity entails,
(c) or the justifications that are offered when deviant behavior is problema-
tized. Again, religion in the workplace constitutes a setting characterized by
negotiation, interpretation and innovation as religion is understood as a
“lived” phenomenon (Edgell, 2012).
Contested Sacralization
When organizations attempt to sacralize some aspect of their identity, cul-

ture, or strategy (Harrison et al., 2009), that ascription of transcendent
meaning may be contested. Harrison et al. (2009) suggest that sacralization
is legitimated with reference to the organization’s institutional environ-
ment, but the legitimation offered by that environment may not necessarily
be univocal: religious institutions may object to the sacralization of brands
or the construction of a cult-like corporate culture (Collins & Porras,
1994), while shareholders, customers, and activists may object to the incor-
poration of religious or quasi-religious symbols or values into a secular
organization. For instance, Trijicon Incorporated for many years subtly

inscribed Christian scriptural references onto the gun sights that it supplied
to the militaries of the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and
Australia; when the practice became public knowledge in 2010, the Military
Religious Freedom Foundation, the Interfaith Alliance, and the Muslim
Public Affairs Council vocally objected, and the American military immedi-
ately ordered the references removed from existing and future gun sights
(Eckholm, 2010). In general, stakeholders’ objections may result in encap-
sulated sensemaking on the part of organization members, or the disaffilia-
tion of members who disagree with the organization (Pratt, 2000). But,
contestation over organizational sacralization may also provide opportu-

nities for organization members to reinterpret the content and meaning of
the values promoted by religious and other institutions, effectively adopting
altered or new religious schemas and scripts, and changing the meaning of
their own religious identity. Exploring the reconciliation of competing con-
struals of the sacred may illustrate the conditions under which differing
bases of institutional authority prevail vis-à-vis the use of religious schemas
in organizations, and further illuminate sensemaking and perhaps moral
imagination in the workplace.
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES ON BEHAVIOR IN

ORGANIZATIONS
Just as situational influences in the workplace can affect the manifestation
and expression of religious identity in the workplace, the role expectations
and scripted behavior embedded in a religious identity can have multiple
kinds of influence on the behavior of individuals in organizations. Here we
focus on five broad categories of influence that have received some degree
of empirical attention (job attitudes, ethics (and related phenomena),
decision making, emotion, and counterproductive behaviors), and in the
context of presenting each we also offer suggestions for future research.
These are summarized in Table 3.
Job Attitudes
Parboteeah et al. (2009) found that a sense of obligation to work, like that
posited in the Protestant ethic (Weber, 1992/1930). and more recent “work
Table 3. Representative Empirical Studies of Religious Influences upon Cognition, Affect, and Behavior.
92
Cognition
Attitudes against organizational Graafland et al. (2006), Longenecker et al. (2004); Parboteeah et al. (2008)
misbehavior
Favorable attitudes toward work Davidson and Caddell (1994), Kutcher et al. (2010), Parboteeah et al. (2009), Weber (1992/
1930), Yousef (2000)
Reduced job satisfaction in the event of Cunningham (2010)
values conflict
Whistle-blowing intentions Martin (Forthcoming)
GARY R. WEAVER AND JASON M. STANSBURY

Affect
Reduction of stress and burnout Kutcher et al. (2010)

Sense of belonging Pratt (2000)
Sense of purpose Pratt (2000)
Behavior
Advocacy for prosocial change Nielsen (1996)

Conflict rooted in values differences Chrobot-Mason et al. (2009)
Destructive conformity Pratt (2000)
Organizational citizenship behaviors Kutcher et al. (2010)
Risk-aversion Hilary and Hui (2009), Kumar (2009), Kumar et al. (2011)
Religion in Organizations: Cognition and Behavior
Potential Religious Influences Upon Cognition, Affect, and Behavior
Cognition
Does religiosity reduce turnover intentions?

Do religious schemas facilitate the reframing of “dirty work“ to overcome occupational taint?
Do religious schemas prevent incumbents of “dirty jobs” from taking action to ameliorate or destigmatize their work?
Do religious schemas promote acquiescence to illegitimate workplace authority?
Affect
Do religious schemas promote antipathy toward persons, entities, or activities in the workplace dubbed "impure" or "unclean"?
Do religious schemas and scripts enhance resilience?
Does the presence of coreligionists in the workplace increase resilience?
Behavior
Are the virtues (e.g., compassion or forgiveness) encoded in many religious identities, schemas, or scripts expressed through virtuous
behavior in the workplace?
Do religious identities, schemas, or scripts promote safety behavior and other rule compliance, perhaps by minimizing risk-taking, or by
inculcating self-control?
Do religiously directive organizations, or those organizations located in more-religious geographic areas, experience diminished
innovation?
Do religiously directive organizations, or those organizations located in more-religious geographic areas, experience stronger safety
climates?
Do religiously based resilience or sense of security cause complacency?
93
as calling” writings, is present in all major religions (see also Yousef (2000)
for information on the Islamic work ethic). Using World Values Survey
data from over 62,000 respondents in 45 nations, Parboteeah and coau-
thors found that higher reported levels of religious belief and observance,
aggregated to the national level, separately predicted higher individual-level
senses of work obligation; this result held regardless of the religiosity of
individual respondents, suggesting that religion as a cultural institution
influences individual workplace attitudes, effectively normalizing particular
views of work. This means that the impact of religion on organizational
behavior sometimes might be direct, via the religious commitment of indivi-
dual employees, while other times it might be mediated through more gen-
eral, extraorganizational societal processes and thereby affect even
nonreligious individuals in that society. At an individual level, however,
Kutcher et al. (2010) similarly found that among American respondents
from a variety of religious affiliations, affective organizational commitment
and job satisfaction were predicted by the strength of religious belief, self-
reported religious practice, and intrinsic religious motivation. In general,
religion often appears to encode schemas in which diligent work is valued,
and the more personally or contextually accessible those schemas are (i.e.,
the stronger the salience of religious identity), the more valued diligence is
likely to be. Insofar as this holds, research also should consider other
potential implications of religiously induced organizational commitment
and job satisfaction, like turnover intentions.
The impact of religious identities, and their attendant schemas and
scripts, that encode work obligations perhaps especially scripts that
encode service to others, humility, and magnanimity may be especially
important for individuals engaged in “dirty work” (Ashforth & Kreiner,
1999; Ashforth & Vaidyanath, 2002). Religious schemas and scripts may
provide such individuals with the reframing and cultural tools needed to
overcome threats to their identities through physical, social, and moral
taint, and demeaning interactions. These schemas and scripts may function
all the more powerfully in religiously directive organizations (Ashforth &
Pratt, 2010) that employ a number of dirty workers, like many hospitals
and hospices, or the janitorial services business of ServiceMaster
Corporation (whose corporate mission includes the “foundational”
admonition to “honor God in all we do”). Of course, the organizational
reinforcement of these religious scripts and schemas may have disadvan-
tages as well as advantages: while they enable workers to maintain rela-
tively positive self-schemas while performing dirty work, they may also
forestall action to redesign these jobs. Religiously induced job satisfaction,
in effect, can have varied implications from encouragement of a high

commitment, high performance workplace to acquiescence in dysfunctional
management practices. Which it will lead to, under what circumstances
(both religious and organizational), is a topic for future research on reli-
gion’s impact in organizations.
Organizational Ethics and Prosocial Behavior
As noted earlier, ethical attitudes are an area in which religious congruence

might be expected to have an important impact, due to the emphasis upon

ethics promoted by many religions (Herman & Schaefer, 2001). But many
studies have found null, weak, or mixed impacts of religiosity upon self-
reported work-related ethical attitudes and behavior, generally using stu-
dent samples and a wide variety of measures of religiosity (summarized in
Weaver & Agle, 2002). For example, Longenecker et al. (2004) investigated
the correlation of religiosity and ethical attitudes using a sample of over
1,200 managers and business professionals from across the United States;
they found that while self-reported religious affiliation (e.g., “Protestant”)
did not predict the assessed ethicality of a series of vignettes, respondents
who indicated that their religion was at least moderately important to
themselves were more ethically conservative than their “low” or “no impor-
tance” counterparts. But as Weaver and Agle’s (2002) analysis indicated, it
is likely that linkages of religious identities and schemas to ethics outcomes
in organizations inevitably reflect the moderating roles of religious identity
salience and other factors that affect the accessibility of workplace-relevant
and ethics-relevant religious schemas and scripts.
Also of interest regarding ethics, however, is the fact that some forms of
religion (e.g., certain fundamentalisms) are associated with particular (spe-
cifically, deferential) attitudes toward authority (Blogowska & Saroglou,
2011). Unquestioning obedience to authority has been associated with
higher levels of unethical behavior in organizations (Trevino & Weaver,
2003). But respectful consideration of authority itself also can be seen as a
moral good by people (Haidt, 2003). As a result, religious identities and
schemas can present new ethical issues and perspectives in organizations
not only directly, through the obvious ethical content of religious teaching,
but also in terms of the kinds of moral intuitions they encourage in their
adherents (e.g., respect toward authority or hierarchy). Anthropologically,
moral intuitions toward a sense of the sacred, or toward sanctity, also are
closely aligned with concerns for one or more culturally specific conception
of purity, thus yielding a kind of ethics-relevant concern on the part of

pious employees that might be far removed from ordinary questions of
organizational ethics. Yet such concern is not inconsequential in organiza-
tional life; ethical conflict or tension can arise due to differences regarding
the need for “purity” in the workplace and related reactions of disgust
toward the impure whether purity is understood (for example) in terms
of eschewing vulgar language, on one hand, or in “cleansing” an organiza-
tion of individuals who sully the image of the organization (e.g., an abusive
supervisor, or a self-dealing and aggressively competitive employee)
(Weaver & Brown, 2012). In short, the potential impact of religious identity
and schemas and the moral outlooks they encourage or incorporate

can extend beyond the “obvious” application of explicit moral principles to
organizational or marketplace ethics. More generally, recognition of reli-
gion’s impact on organizational behavior requires considering a potentially
wider range of not only ethical beliefs but also ethically relevant emotions
in organizations whether respect and deference toward authorities,
or disgust and cleansing of the vulgar, or the avoidance of certain activities
(e.g., investment in “sin stocks”). And insofar as not all employees, religious
or nonreligious, will display the same degree of religious identity salience,
or will share (or have triggered) these attitudes, the potential for ethical
conflict and tension is clear even though that conflict might proceed at
intuitive, “gut” levels rather than at any level of explicit, rationally focused
ethical debate.
Related to ethics, prosocial workplace behaviors may be influenced by
religion as well. Brotheridge and Lee (2007) theorized that because of ubi-
quitous religious exhortations to prosocial behavior, religiosity would pre-
dict individuals’ engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors,
particularly when those individuals showed high intrinsic and low extrinsic
religious motivation. Kutcher et al. (2010) found that intrinsic religious
motivation did in fact predict self-reported OCBs, as did their other mea-
sures of religiosity. Whistle-blowing is another prosocial workplace behavior,
though empirical evidence on the impact of religiosity upon whistle-blowing
is scarce: one vignette study of whistleblowing intentions among undergradu-
ates showed null results (Martin, forthcoming). Chen, Eisenberger, Johnson,
Sucharski, and Aselage (2009) found that perceived organizational support,
including support from one’s manager, leads to extra-role behavior; perhaps
the influence of religiosity upon prosocial workplace behaviors, especially
risky ones like whistle-blowing, is moderated by perceived organizational
support. The organization’s openness to religious expression may be an espe-
cially important element of perceived organizational support, if some schema
or script from an individual’s religion prescribes prosocial behavior, or if an

individual’s sense of religious identity motivates prosocial behavior and is
made more salient by the organizational context. Kutcher et al. (2010) found
that perceptions of the workplace’s openness to respondents’ religious
expression did in fact predict OCBs. Religious scripts and motivations for
prosocial behavior would seem to translate well to the workplace, especially
when welcomed as such by the organization.
Future research on the influence of religion upon organizational beha-
vior also should address the burgeoning field of positive organizational
scholarship. As an extension of positive psychology into organization
studies, positive organizational scholarship investigates individual and

collective phenomena that contribute to the well-functioning of people and
organizations. This work includes a number of phenomena that have
historically been called “virtues,” like compassion, forgiveness, courage,
and resilience, and virtues such as these have been argued to be linked to
identity (Weaver, 2006). Peterson and Seligman (2004) claim that their
review of the doctrines of world religions reveals that all agree on a set of
universally admired virtues, which Peterson and Seligman then elaborate in
considerable psychological detail. Lilius, Kanov, Dutton, Worline, and
Maitlis (2011) note that compassion in particular is featured in a number
of religions’ responses to suffering; religious schemas may influence com-
passion in the workplace by facilitating the noticing of suffering, by
strengthening relationships among individuals, and by providing cultural
resources for engaging people who are suffering. Worthington et al. (2010)
argue that a religiously based relationship between people, or beliefs about
a religiously inspired imperative, may promote forgiveness in the work-
place, but a feeling of sacrilege can prevent forgiveness. Although religious
beliefs and affects may often support a range of virtuous behaviors,
the problem of limited congruence is likely to make relationships between
religion and virtue complex.
Decision Making
Some empirical research has shown linkages from individuals’ religion to

their business related decision making in contexts not necessarily or directly
linked to ethics and virtue as conventionally understood. Stances toward
risk in workplace decision making also can be influenced by religion
(and willingness to take risks also can be related to matters of ethics). Liu
(2010) found that religious affiliation among Taiwanese did not predict
self-reported risk-taking propensity, but that the frequency of attendance

at religious services did. Using World Values Survey data, Miller (2000)
found that religious affiliation, the importance of religion, and frequency of
attendance at religious services all predicted risk aversion in the United
States, Italy, and Turkey, but not in Japan or India. Theoretically, attenua-
tion of the agency problem that results from stronger work obligations
(noted above in the “job attitudes” section) would mean that in more-
religious locales, organizations can be expected to employ flatter organiza-
tional structures, award higher fixed salaries and smaller incentive-
compensation packages, and take smaller business risks, resulting in slower
growth (Carlin & Gervais, 2009). Hilary and Hui (2009) found that in
American counties with a higher ratio of religious adherents to total popula-
tion, firms do in fact accept lower degrees of risk exposure and realize slower
growth. Similarly, Kumar, Page, and Spalt (2011) theorized that on the basis
of historic antipathy toward gambling among Protestants, financial decision
makers in areas with stronger Protestant (vs. Roman Catholic) influences
would be more conservative in their investments, regardless of the faith of
the particular decision maker. Empirically, Kumar et al. found that in
American counties with a higher ratio of Catholics to Protestants, small and
midsized institutional investors are more likely to hold stocks with low prices
and high volatility (i.e., “lottery stocks”); firms are more likely to offer
broad-based employee stock option plans; stock price appreciation on the
first day of trading following an initial public offering is higher for firms
located in these counties; and the discount placed on lottery stocks is greater
for firms located in these counties. It appears that available religious schemas
pertaining to risk-taking (and perhaps the potential receipt of gain without
visible effort, as in the Weberian Protestant work ethic) affect appetites for
risk, most strongly for religious adherents, but also for nonadherents (as
noted as well, above, regarding job attitudes among nonadherents in reli-
gious cultures). Thus, contextual factors that render religious identity more
salient can have decision making impacts that range beyond obviously reli-
gious matters.
In practices other than investment and compensation decisions, one can
ask whether this reduced risk tolerance means that more religious indivi-
duals, or those who participate in religious activities in the workplace, or
those who decorate themselves or their workspaces with religious symbols,
might, ceteris paribus, be more likely to follow safety rules and other stan-
dard operating procedures (and be less likely to innovate). Intrinsic religios-
ity positively predicts self-control (as found by Vitell et al., (2009)), which
in turn predicts rule-following (Tyler & Blader, 2005); however, extrinsic
religiosity negatively predicts self-control (Vitell et al., 2009). Religiously

directive organizations (Ashforth & Pratt, 2010), or organizations located
in more-religious areas, may also experience stronger safety or less innova-
tive climates (Zohar, 1980, 2003) due to the greater accessibility of risk-
averse schemas. Of course, these inclinations do not occur in a vacuum;
risk-averse reluctance to engage in certain behaviors could be moderated
by the sense of long-term security or complacency that religions often
provide to their adherents.
Stress and Workplace Affect
Kutcher et al. (2010) found that their abovementioned measures of religios-

ity all reduced both stress and burnout in the workplace; however, religios-
ity did not moderate the relationship between stress and burnout,
suggesting that religiosity helps workers to reduce their stress levels and
therefore their rates of burnout, but does not help workers to cope with
higher stress levels (Kutcher et al., 2010). In addition, conflicts between
deeply felt religious role expectations (as embodied in religiously generated
behavioral scripts) and work-related role expectations can enhance, rather
than reduce, experienced stress (Exline & Bright, 2011). More generally,
religion has been found to increase older adults’ sense that they matter, an
important psychosocial resource that was bolstered all the more for low-
status individuals (Schieman et al., 2010).
The fact that religion is well-known to have powerful affective effects for
adherents in religious roles or contexts, as discussed above (Edgell, 2012;
Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003), suggests that the potential exists for religion
to magnify or introduce affect in the workplace, as well as suppress certain
affects as Kutcher et al. reported. However, individuals are often adept at
managing their responses in order to conserve scarce emotional and other
resources: Cameron and Payne (2011) found that individuals felt less com-
passion in the face of widespread suffering when they expected to be asked
for donations, or when they were instructed to manage their emotions.
Thus, religion may provide important affective resources and cultural
tools for enhancing resilience and a sense of security in the workplace
(Caza & Milton, 2011), perhaps all the more so within workplace networks
of co-religionists. However, religious individuals may or may not be more
likely to display compassion or forgiveness, if they resist their own scripts
that encode costly obligations. Resilience and security conceivably could
foster complacency as well. Just how religious schemas and identities work
themselves out in this regard likely will depend on the process by which
religious adherents negotiate and make sense of the meaning of their reli-
gious commitments in the lived context of the workplace, in light of other
influences on their overall sense of identity and sensemaking process.
Organizationally Counterproductive Behaviors
Much of the empirical research reviewed above has highlighted positive

outcomes, leaving ample opportunities to investigate more problematic
effects of religious identities and schemas (when activated, or perhaps when

not activated as well). Some of these may include outright discrimination or
harassment on the part of religious employees against others (Day, 2005;
Day & Greene, 2008), a loss of cohesion between adherents of one religion
and other employees (Chrobot-Mason et al., 2009; Mentzer, 2002), the
stress of intrapersonal or interpersonal religious struggle in the workplace
(Exline & Bright, 2011), the costs of accommodation of religious practices
(Polley, Vora, & SubbaNarasimha, 2005), or the use of religious pretexts to
avoid performing appropriate work roles (Lips-Wiersma, Lund Dean, &
Fornacieri, 2009). The impact of religious fundamentalism upon prejudice
seems to be partially mediated by need for cognition and preference for
consistency (Hill et al., 2010), while the impact of fundamentalism upon
prosocial behavior seems to be moderated by the threat that the behavioral
target’s identity poses to the individual’s worldview (Blogowska &
Saroglou, 2011). Although theorists have posited a number of likely work-
place conflicts between religious individuals and others, to our knowledge
relatively little empirical work has been done on the subject, possibly due to
the difficulty of collecting data on such a sensitive topic. Moreover, not all
potential negative outcomes stem from some sort of religious conflict:
destructive conformity may also result from religious attitudes and behavior
in the workplace (Polley et al., 2005; Pratt, 2000; Salvador et al., 2007),
sometimes leading to a loss of perspective due to the discouragement of
alternative expressions (Ashforth & Pratt, 2010). For example, Weaver and
Brown (2012) argued that if organization members view certain practices or
outcomes as essentially sacred or pure, they might be more willing to engage
in any means to achieve that outcome (including manipulative organiza-
tional politics), or, alternatively, be reluctant to resort to any means that
might sully the sacred purity of the desired outcome. Religious identities,
schemas, and scripts also can be used to increase managers’ control, not
only over workers’ behavior, but also over their cognitions and affect, and
even over their relationships with significant others in nonwork life roles,
enabling organizations to instrumentally abuse workers (Ashforth & Pratt,
2010; Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009; Pratt, 2000). Thus, religious belief and
behavior in the workplace poses potential issues, whether or not it results in
conflict.
CONCLUSION
The study of religious behavior, affect, and cognition in the workplace has
potential implications across fields. Scholars of the sociology and psychol-
ogy of religion may find the context of the workplace to be especially
interesting, because it challenges the expression (or not) of religious identi-
ties, cognitions, affects, and behaviors in ways that more traditionally reli-
gious contexts (e.g., congregations) generally do not. Religious congruence
(Chaves, 2010) in the workplace, where alternative scripts and schemas
abound, may indicate especially strong effects of predictors or moderators.
Moreover, the particular contents of religious cognitions and affects may
have important effects on ethical behavior, personal and organizational
resilience, the management of diversity, and group cohesion. And
although our approach has been predominantly “micro” in focus, we
recognize that religious institutions proffer their own, and contribute to
other, larger institutional logics that influence the cognition and behavior
of individuals, and that individual religious adherents thus can become the
means by which larger religiously informed logics can influence organiza-
tional practices. Thus religiously influenced intraorganizational behavioral
processes also might owe some of their origins to extraorganizational fac-
tors, and in the long run religion’s intraorganizational impact in turn can
influence organizational environments as the actions of religious adherents
in the workplace influence the actions their organizations take on their
environments. Thus, our “micro” treatment of the topic should be consid-
ered in the context of other, more cross-level approaches to religion in
organizations.
The workplace may also highlight processes of religious identity
construction or priming that are obviated in more traditionally religious
contexts, while religion in the workplace may showcase phenomena that
are expressed more subtly in other realms of organizational behavior.
Carpenter and Marshall (2009) have shown that priming increases the
behavioral congruence of religious beliefs about ethics; further research on
the endogenous aspects of a situation that prompt a recognition of equivo-

cality and the selection of a religious schema on the part of an individual
may enrich the literature on religious decision making, especially if those
aspects of the situation are mediated or moderated by aspects of the
person. Moreover, the sensemaking that occurs over the introduction or
contestation of sacred schemas may illustrate the social construction of the
sacred itself. Identifying the social determinants of the ascription of sacred-
ness to a schema will contribute to literatures on the sociology of the
sacred, organizational identity, and sensemaking. Moreover, identifying
the social determinants of the retention or disposal of sacred schemas, or of
the sacredness of schemas, when they are contested would also contribute
to all three literatures. Ascertaining whether certain schemas that are
ascribed transcendent value in and of themselves get preferential treatment
in sensemaking processes would contribute to the literatures on sensemak-
ing and moral imagination (Werhane, 1999), as would discerning how those
schemas get and lose that status.
One potentially productive tension that scholars should bear in mind is
between instrumentality and authenticity. Research that highlights the
positive or negative outcomes of religion for organizations inescapably
adds to the case for or against religious expression within organizations.
While such findings may inform managers and management scholars who
desire to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations, it
is important to remember that religion is a human phenomenon that is
in many cases deeply and intrinsically important to its participants.
Co-opting or suppressing religious cognitions, affects, or behaviors for
the benefit of the organization risks violating the sense of sacredness held
by those participants (Lips-Wiersma et al., 2009). Moreover, because of
its roots in the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment, the theory and
practice of management has an inescapable tendency to rationalize the
phenomena within its domain (Ghoshal, 2005; MacIntyre, 1984). For
example, a movement like positive psychology or positive organizational
scholarship may, in its efforts to theorize and operationalize religious
virtues, reduce them to something less than their meaning and nuance in
the particular religious traditions from whence they come. Management
scholarship (and practice) regarding religion must therefore ask itself
whether its distinctively managerial outlook renders its treatment of
religion necessarily incomplete, failing to capture the lived experience of
religious employees, with the explanation of and cooperation with their reli-
gions becoming instead a form of reduction and cooptation unrecognizable
to those employees.
NOTE
1. Rational choice accounts of religion, which we have not mentioned yet, also
argue that intentional individual decision making forms the basis of persons’ identi-
fication and affiliation with particular religions, as people seek promises of future
reward that serve as compensatory fulfillments of their goals and hopes (Stark &
Finke, 2000). Rational choice and “supply side” market accounts that explain
choices of religion and macro-level findings about denominational success and
failure (especially in situations of religious diversity and competition) have been
influential in sociological and economic scholarship on religion. But such accounts
are less adept at considering the functioning of religions as socially embedded
(Edgell, 2006) and idealistic or moralized ways of life (Jerolmack & Porpora, 2004)
rather than exercises in individual self-interest (Johnson, 2003). So we do not
consider them further here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The second author would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of

James and Judith Chambery.
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Religion and Organization Theory

Religion in organizations: Cognition and behavior

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Gary R. Weaver and Jason M. Stansbury

Religious institutions can affect organizational practices when employees

Religion and Organization Theory

Religion influences a range of phenomena that are relevant to the work-

sensemaking; (3) focus more specifically on religion as a source of identity

MAPPING THE TERRAIN RELIGION

Conceptualizations of religion are many. Common to many of them is the

emphasizes religion as ongoing social practices embedded in often-

from the institutionalized elements of everyday religious practice and the

in terms of an emergent evolutionary motive away from the dirty and

Ashforth and Pratt suggested that in the workplace, spirituality is com-

spirituality because the relative specificity of belief, identification, and

THEORIES OF RELIGION’S INFLUENCE ON

Religion has been shown to impact a wide range of individual cognitions,

The identity-based approach (summarized in our introductory paragraphs)

Weaver and Agle (2002). This approach has obvious relationships to

explicitly in terms of identity models, considerable research in the psychol-

An alternative perspective in the sociology of religion, rooted in older

Whereas the foregoing cultural approach emphasizes broader religious

A Common Core: Identity, Schematic Cognition, and Scripted Behavior

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY, COGNITION, AND BEHAVIOR

In what follows we outline a broad theoretical approach to understanding

affective, cognitive, and behavioral expectations for people; that religious

Religious Identity, Identity Salience, and Behavior

Identity often is characterized as being a deeply embedded sense of self

Table 1. Representative Empirical Studies of Religious Influences upon

Prejudice Hill et al. (2010)

Charitable giving Peifer (2010); Winchester (2008)

find similar internal/external distinctions in studies of the way religion plays

commitment and external behavioral observance occur. For example, a

externally symbolized religious identity (as in the case of “fuzzy fidelities”

Religiously Formed Schemas and Scripts

Religions often include behavioral guidelines or requirements (Glock, 1959,

so stronger levels of self-identification with a religion should, ceteris paribus,

Along with affective role expectations, religious participation can bring

Breadth and Malleability of Religious Identity, Schemas, and Scripts

religious terms, such as being a divine calling or a form of divinely expected

Identity Salience Variation and the Moderation of Religious Influence

Even deeply embedded religious identities, and their attendant schemas,

giously based or religiously identified relationships a person has influences

ORGANIZATIONAL INFLUENCES ON RELIGIOUS

The result of the foregoing review of theory and research on religion’s

Religious Cognitions and

Variation in Identity Salience, Schemas, and Scripting

Prior research has proposed or identified a number of contextual influences

scription to that ethos, whereas commitments to co-religionists in the

Table 2. Representative Empirical Studies of Organizational Influences upon Religious Behavior.

Potential Organizational Influences Upon Religious Behavior

of religious cultural artifacts, should increase the salience of religious

workplace, pluralism will not necessarily prompt or suppress religious belief

Sensemaking and Religious Schemas

As noted earlier, contextual influences on religiously formed behavior can

Scripted behavior and schematic thinking is not always straightforwardly

forming an associated script, or by discussing it with others. If that schema

Organization Level Processes

Organization level phenomena such as organizational cultural norms,

supportive or not vis-à-vis religious identity and schemas. Scheitle’s

(perhaps high-profile) organizations adopt particular stances vis-à-vis reli-

FUTURE RESEARCH ON ORGANIZATIONAL