For creating unity and oneness in organizations: Understanding oneness behaviors in organizations from the perspective of integrative self-knowledge and organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

For healthy and effective organizations, there has to be a unity in diversity which is sometimes termed as "Oneness", characterized by a mysterious spiritual and emotional bond between people (Hung, 2006). Related to Oneness principle, there is actually no "Other" but "We". In the same line of thought, when you see no other, you help and support the correspondent no matter what his or her position/race/religion. As a concept, Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) seems to have common attitudinal and behavioral aspects (Organ & Ryan, 1995) such as Consideration of others and Altruism. There have been many attempts to understand OCB from dispositional and attitudinal perspectives. Usually, the personality factors have been argued to be indirect contributors to the construct. Instead, attitudinal contributors such as job satisfaction and commitment have been found to have a strong link. In this study, a personal attitudinal domain, integrative self-knowledge (Ghorbani, Cunningham, & Watson, 2010) which is said to include "an ongoing sense of self awareness" and "stable mental representations" (Robins, Norem, & Cheek, 1999; as cited in Ghorbani, Watson, & Hargis, 2008) will be explored. As a feature of positive psychology, Ghorbani et al. (2008) argue that self-knowledge research has promise in promoting an understanding of psychological well-being across cultures. A psychologically healthy individual is said to be integrated in mind, body and soul; with no energy leakage from any disintegrated parts. Therefore, integrative self-knowledge will be treated as an independent variable regarding its predictive value for OCB and also the exploratory dependent variable Oneness Behavior in a sample of working population from different industries. By exploring the link between these concepts, this study will try to explain how individual variables contribute to the organizational effectiveness and healthiness as a whole, including our Global situation. As Ritchlin (2010) points out: "From the perspective of the global mind, our collective historical moment brings us to a bifurcation point of great magnitude and import that calls upon the inner integrity of each of us-our "inner sage"-to respond with care to the subtlest beginnings of what is to come".