TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF SPIRITUALITY IN

COLLABORATIVE WORK PRACTICES IN DESIGN

1. Abstract

With changing times, creative industries have embraced the transformation of traditional industrial
practices into knowledge-driven work practices. This evolution of collaborative work practice will
bring a shift in design education as well, by creating new domains of collective creativity. Hence,
knowledge sharing behaviour is important for co-creating value. Design education needs to include
approaches that encourage knowledge sharing, to prepare students for future employment in these
creative industries. In this paper we explore how spirituality benefits designers and supports their
knowledge sharing behaviour. Scholars have argued that there are potential benefits of introducing
spirituality at work. Spiritual individuals seek meaning and purpose in their lives that connects them
to others and to their work communities, hence, enhancing their knowledge sharing behaviour. The
ultimate goal of this research is to examine the relationships of the variables that would help
establish a strong and significant relationship between spirituality and knowledge sharing behaviour
among designers.

2. Introduction

The past few years have seen, ‘design thinking’ become a megatrend. Most organizations have
adopted design-led approaches, because of its creativity-driven approach to innovate physical
products, intangible services and even solve complex social problems. The importance of free flow of
knowledge to enhance creativity, is being widely recognized. This is of particular relevance to
creative industries who need wide range of distributed resources to consume and create knowledge
to fully exploit the market opportunities. Thus, the working environment in the industry is changing
swiftly for designers. There is an urgent need for design educators to introduce these emerging
design practices in the design curriculum.

In design education, conventionally the students are given design briefs: Starting from gathering
information, following design process techniques, improvising according to advice from mentors and
peers to finally proposing the design solution. This approach occurs in isolation where tutor guides
the student and evaluates on the individuality of the students’ design work. In spite of the design
programmes supporting group work, students have found difficulty in exchanging knowledge and
ideas required for the collaborative work. To function effectively within the industry, learners must
have varied proficiencies to be able to work in diverse, distributed as well as ill-defined work
environments. Knowledge sharing through inter-disciplinary approach is of prime importance in
design curriculum. Thus, the learners need to seek ways and means to connect to one another to co-
create innovation.

Spirituality provides an individual a sense of interconnectedness, increasing ones creativity,

attachment, reliability and belonging to the institution. Consequences of these spiritual relationships
lead to increased group cohesion, performance and efficiency. Establishing, such a shared power
among learners at the academic level itself, will foster effective knowledge sharing and help them in
the emerging design careers.

The paper proposes that 21st century needs spirited learning environments, which are connected
with trust, compassion and meaningful work to achieve collective creativity.

3. Review of current literature

3.1 Knowledge sharing in design practices

Increasingly, we are seeing a convergence of technology, design thinking, user centred design and
experience design. The emerging design practises are shifting the focus from designing of ‘products’
to designing for ‘a purpose’. This change has affected education of designers immensely:
‘The meaning of value and the process of value creation are rapidly shifting from a product and firm-
centric view to personalized consumer experiences. Informed, networked, empowered and active
consumers are increasingly co-creating value with the firm. ‘ ( Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004)

Design education today, needs to move towards more holistic, multi-disciplinary approach to create
designers who can design strategically with an amalgamation of aesthetics, business, technological
and sociological concerns ( British Council & India Design Council 2016). The exchange of knowledge
and experiences among different design disciplines will foster value co-creation.

Knowledge sharing involves ‘willingness’ of an individual to share experiences and work-related

knowledge with other members (Riege 2005). Knowledge sharing begins at an individual level
spreading to the institutional level (Ipe, 2003). Rewards and monetary incentive factors ineffectively
encourage knowledge sharing intention (Bock and Kim 2002, Tohidinia and Mosakhani 2010, Jeon
etal 2011). According to prior studies, the non-monetary factors like enjoyment of helping others,
self-efficacy, interpersonal trust and scholar humility highly determine the knowledge sharing
behaviour (Lin 2007; Hsu & Lin 2008; Kankanhalli et al 2005; Wasko & Faraj 2005).

A. Enjoyment of helping others:

Enhancement of professional reputation is one of the factors that encourages people to
contribute their knowledge (Wasko and Faraj 2005). They enjoy sharing their experiences
with others, without expecting any help in return. This study shows that rewarding oneself
motivates them to help in exchange of information in an institution.
B. Self-efficacy:
It is a self-evaluating factor that helps an individual to see his or her confidence level and
capabilities to be able to provide valuable knowledge to others. Self-efficacy is one of the
best motivators for improving knowledge sharing in an individual (Chowdhury and Alam
2007).
C. Interpersonal trust:
Knowledge sharing is basically social interaction among individuals and hence, trust is an
important factor influencing such a social exchange. More the interpersonal trust, more
‘willingness’ has been observed among individuals to share knowledge (Bakker, Leenders,
Gabbay, Kratzer & Van Engelen 2006).
D. Scholar Humility:
Humility, in attitude and spirit, invites knowledge and will to share it with others. According
to the theory of virtue of Aristotle, individual’s character is the key to one’s actions and
behaviours. Thus, humility should be seen as one’s personal strength that will positively
affect one’s knowledge sharing behaviour.

Knowledge sharing has two aspects: Knowledge donation and knowledge collection (Van Den Hooff
and De Ridder’s 2004). Knowledge donating is defined as “communication based upon an
individual’s own wish to transfer intellectual capital” and knowledge collecting as “attempting to
persuade others to share what they know”.

Thus, Knowledge-sharing behaviour represents an interactive process during which team members
exchange ideas, information and viewpoints (Srivastava et al 2006), to create new collective
knowledge. This is crucial in emerging design practises, to address larger scopes, scales and
complexities that future users will demand.

3.2 Spirituality and knowledge sharing behaviour

‘Spirituality’ is more abstract than ‘religion’. It means different things to different people. In this
paper, we see spirituality as an individual’s philosophy, values, or meaning of life (Kellehear 2000).
Spirituality comes from the Latin word ‘spiritus’, meaning vapour, breath, air or wind. ‘Spirituality is
the desire to find one‘s ultimate purpose in life, and to live accordingly.’ (Mitroff & Denton 1999)

According to Krishnakumar and Neck (2002), spirituality has following positive influences: intuition
and creativity, honesty and trust, personal fulfilment and commitment, as elaborated below.

A. Intuition and creativity:

 Spiritual practices enhance intuition, insight, inspiration and unbridled creativity. It expands
one’s thinking and helps them trust their inner wisdom to find innovative solutions to problems.
B. Honesty and trust:
Trust is the crux of spirituality. Trust can lead to openness, honesty and flow of information
among individuals.
C. Personal fulfilment:
The sense of personal achievement is obtained by fostering spirituality within oneself. This
acts as a lubricant for knowledge sharing intention as discussed above.
D. Commitment:
Spirituality increases commitment, which is a sense of belonging to an institution. Trust and
honesty also help in enhancing one’s commitment to their institution. Strong commitment
leads to willingness to make efforts for institutional goals.

Thus, spirituality serves as a bridge for connecting with others. It is that connection that leads us to
experience the fullness of life (Palmer 2000). It is about people sharing and experiencing some
common attachment, attraction, and togetherness within their work. The journey towards
connectedness is often experienced within classes, where we must share power with students to co-
create learning experiences (Wiley 2010). The literature studies also revealed that spiritual
individuals are more likely to demonstrate enhanced teamwork ( Neck and Milliman, 1994),
increased honesty and trust within their institution (Krishnakumar and Neck, 2002). This in turn will
help designers to build relationships with their audiences that can have an impact with positive,
long-range consequences.

The above literatures indicate the factors influenced by spirituality and factors affecting knowledge
sharing behaviour. The aim of this paper is to study the relationship among these variables. We
argue that spirituality has positive influences (intuition and creativity, honesty and trust, personal
fulfilment and commitment) which enhance intrinsic rewards (enjoyment of helping others, self-
efficacy, interpersonal trust and scholar humility) and strengthen the foundation of knowledge
sharing behaviour, important for co-creating value through design practises.

4. Methods

4.1 Instruments:

Existing instruments were used to measure the following constructs:

i) Spirituality
ii) Knowledge sharing behaviour

Spirituality : Spirituality Perspective Scale (SPS) created by Reed in 1986, was used. It is a 10-item
multi-dimensional scale with

i) First four questions to measure the frequency of a person engaged in spiritually-related

activities on a 5-point Likert scale (1.0=Not at all to 5.0=Once in a day).
ii) Last six questions to study a person’s perspective on the extent to which they hold these
spiritual views on a 5-point Likert scale (1.0=strongly disagree to 5.0=strongly agree).

Knowledge-sharing behaviours: According to Wasko & Faraj (2005) theory, an 18-item questionnaire
was prepared based on the level to which following factors affect knowledge sharing behaviour:

i) Enjoyment of helping others

ii) Self-efficacy
iii) Interpersonal trust
iv) Self-efficacy

These items above were measured on a 5-point Likert Scale (1.0=strongly disagree to 5.0=strongly
agree)

4.2 Data collection and sample characteristics:

The non-probability convenience sampling method was used, with a self-administered

questionnaire. This method allowed us to reach the maximum number of sample respondents within
a time limit. The questionnaire was distributed to students from each design discipline in
undergraduate and post-graduate programmes. The usable sample size taken was 30.

The majority of respondents were female (71.4%), with an average age of 22 years. Over 30 percent
were from the post-graduate programme and rest all were from the undergraduate programme.