ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
This article is part of the Research TopicCatalyzing Public Health Leadership Research, Practice, Education, and TrainingView all 19 articles
The Relevance of Spiritual Leadership to Public Health: Values, Meaning and Purpose
Provisionally accepted
Louis Fry1
Barbara Wei2
Fawn Phelps2
Richard Siegrist2
William Bean2
Theodore J. Witherell2
Howard K Koh2*- 1Texas A&M University-Central Texas, Killeen, United States
- 2School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, United States
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Public health currently faces many enormous challenges that highlight the urgent need for more effective leadership models. This paper explores Spiritual Leadership in the Workplace as a potential approach to informing and animating the field of Public Health Leadership. Developed and applied over the past two decades, Spiritual Leadership is defined as the “values, attitudes, and behaviors necessary both to motivate and inspire workers and to enhance key individual and organizational goals through a vision of service and a culture based on altruism”. While for some it can relate to, and build upon, religious practices, Spiritual Leadership more broadly relates to leadership based on personal values and actions emerging from a sense of mission, purpose, and connection to something bigger than oneself. This paper first describes the origin and evolution of Spiritual Leadership and its necessary and organizational development competencies. Then, we conduct a literature review about Public Health Leadership competencies and find that many of them map directly onto the Spiritual Leadership model, thereby opening an opportunity for integration. We also acknowledge both opportunities and challenges for Spiritual Leadership implementation in secular and culturally diverse settings while noting substantial anecdotal indications that many public health leaders already enact Spiritual Leadership -consistent practices. We conclude with a discussion on implications for Public Health Leadership education, workforce development, and research. Spiritual Leadership can serve as a unifying, practice-oriented leadership perspective that can help strengthen purpose, belonging, and resilience in public health organizations.
Keywords: Public health leadership, Spiritual leadership (SL), Public health competences, Leadership development, public health training and education
Received: 21 May 2025; Accepted: 05 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fry, Wei, Phelps, Siegrist, Bean, Witherell and Koh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Howard K Koh, hkoh@hsph.harvard.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.