Spiritual leadership through ego-transcendence: Exceptional responses to challenging circumstances

This study explores how ten internationally renowned human rights leaders pioneered social innovations through their non-violent, spiritual engagement with challenging circumstances. The study illuminates the spiritual generativity of ego-transcendental processes underlying the transformation of challenges into opportunities by these leaders in responding exceptionally to challenging circumstances. The method adapts procedures of transcendental phenomenology, phenomenography and other qualitative approaches. Based on an in-depth analysis of 504 events from the autobiographies of the ten leaders, the paper integrates the uniformities underlying the particularistic aspects of exceptional responses resulting from a vertical, within-autobiography analysis. The uniformities underlying the universalistic aspects of exceptional responses, in turn, result from a horizontal, across-autobiographies analysis. An integrative conceptual framework of spiritual leadership based on ego-transcendence is presented.