From Spirituality to Wellbeing at Work: A Critical Appraisal of Workplace Happiness and Workplace Belongingness as Mediating Mechanisms

Abstract

Organisational interest in spirituality at work has grown alongside a parallel concern with employee wellbeing, and a substantial empirical literature now reports positive associations between the two. The mechanisms that connect them remain poorly specified. Two candidate mechanisms recur in recent modelling: workplace happiness, understood as the affective and evaluative quality of working life, and workplace belongingness, understood as the perceived quality of membership within a work community. This article provides a critical narrative review of the conceptual, theoretical and empirical basis for treating these two constructs as mediators of the relationship between workplace spirituality and employee wellbeing. Literature published between January 1995 and 15 June 2026 was identified through multidisciplinary and biomedical scholarly indexes, supplemented by backward and forward citation searching. The review examines definitional stability, competing theoretical accounts, the design quality of the mediation evidence, and the alignment between the claims made and the evidence available. Three findings dominate. Definitional overlap between workplace spirituality, workplace happiness and workplace belongingness is substantial enough that reported mediation may partly reflect shared item content rather than a causal sequence. Evidence for the happiness pathway rests on a small number of studies, most of which are cross-sectional, single-source and geographically concentrated, although two recent two-wave designs offer a modest improvement. Evidence for the belongingness pathway is weaker still, because the spirituality-to-belongingness link is frequently assumed rather than tested, and the single cross-lagged longitudinal study located did not support the prospective belongingness-to-wellbeing effect that mediation models presuppose. Confidence in the proposed mediating architecture is therefore limited, and the practical inference that cultivating spiritual climate will raise wellbeing through happiness or belonging is not yet warranted. Priorities for future work include discriminant validation of the four constructs, intensive longitudinal and experimental designs, multi-source measurement, and deliberate diversification of the empirical base beyond its current concentration.