User:Leading Learning/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

Workplace spirituality

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article because this is roughly the topic of a literature review I am currently conducting with another faculty member. This topic and article matters because research shows that workplace spirituality, often framed in terms of finding meaning and purpose in one's career and work, can significantly impact career development and trajectory, worker health and wellness, and organizational cultures. As a start-class rated article, I didn't expect the quality to be high. The opening paragraph confirmed my initial assumption about the article. The lead sentence was vague and also lacked a citation.

Evaluate the article

(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead section

As mentioned above, the lead section is vague and short. The sources cited in this section are listed in References as in-text citations and then appear under a sub-heading called Sources. This should be cleaned up and cited appropriately using standard Wikipedia citation. This lead is too concise and could benefit from additional framing about various ways spirituality in the workplace is often framed and how these framings go beyond religious affiliations, beliefs, or practices.

Content

The sources cited are pretty dated. Most were published in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The most recently published source cited comes from 2011. The article calls spirituality in the workplace as a movement primarily located in the United States. The workplace spirituality research, however, typically frames this topic as an experience of workers or a phenomenon or aspect of workplace culture and life. There are opportunities to think about workplace spirtuality in global contexts and the contributions that underrepresented populations (e.g., women) have made to making workplace spirituality a concern for adult education and career development.

In the theory section, each of the theories and connection to workplace spirituality could be elaborated. I'm not sure what Social Exchange Theory's link to this article is and there are no relevant citations to this bullet.

Tone and Balance

There's not much to this article and the tone is neutral for the most part. I think some balance could be achieved, however, by adding content and resources that speak to the tension between spirituality and the performance-oriented goals and competitive natures of most workplaces in capitalist economies, however.

Sources and References

I plan to incorporate many academic sources that I am looking at as part of my spirituality in adult education and HRD literature review. I will start with these peer-review articles from a spirituality-oriented special issue of Adult Learning. Even though this is already over 20 years old (published in 2001), these scholarly articles from this practitioner-oriented journal will help me bring in more of the history of this topic in these overlapping fields and start to get at some specific practices educators and organizational leaders have found useful for cultivating spiritual classrooms and workplaces.

Organization and writing quality

The existing subheadings need much more content with cited references. History and Theories subsections might remain, but I'm not sure what the Examples subheading is supposed to be. The content currently in that section might be better suited to a more general section about how spirituality is often defined in the context of workplace learning. I will definitely rename this section and think about how to roll the content into a section with a more descriptive heading. I think there will need to be a section on defining workplace spirituality, a section on tensions that often exist between spiritual orientation and practices and workplace cultures and goals, and a section related to specific practices various organizational cultures and leaders have used to facilitate spirituality in the workplace.

Images and Media

I will search Wikimedia Commons to see if any available images seem suitable to include to enhance this article.

Talk page discussion

The article talk page features a banner with a warning about broken links needing to be fixed as well as an indication that the citation style is inconsistent and needs to be cleaned up. I will work on both of these as I edit. Only one user has left a comment about whether further discussion exists about cleaning up this article (none does). This comment is from almost 10 years ago!

Overall impressions

There is a lot I can do to improve this article. I will also look into similar articles that might exist within Wikipedia.