Abstract
An implicit requirement of successful organization outcomes is the faithfulness of both leaders and followers. David’s faithfulness to the faithless King Saul becomes a helpful biblical example. This chapter will analyze a biblical understanding of faithfulness and its application to organizational leadership. This analysis will show faithfulness to be not only a characteristic of God but also an expression of one’s standing with God, with others, and with one’s own adherence to the beliefs that govern their life. From the covenant of the Old Testament to the authenticity of Greek understanding to the endurance under suffering of the New Testament, this characteristic has several important applications to contemporary organizations. These applications are applied to a contemporary example of funeral directors.
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Chapter Addendum on the Scale for Faithfulness
Chapter Addendum on the Scale for Faithfulness
Twelve items were developed from the exegetical study, and the expert panel rated 11 of the items at an average of 3 or higher, but rated the following item below 3, thus we removed the item from the pool:
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My manager seeks to restore relationships with those who have broken trust with him/her.
In this addendum, we present the sample demographics, KMO and Bartlett’s test for sphericity results, the results of the principal component analysis, and the optimized final scale for gentleness.
Of the 81 people in our participant pool, 67 completed the survey, which is above the minimum of five participants per item recommended by DeVellis (2017). The sample consisted of 39 males and 28 females. Two participants were aged 21–29, ten were in the age group of 30–39, 17 were 40–49 years of age, 16 were between 50 and 59, and the remaining 22 were 60 or over. Sixty-four people were from the United States, one from Canada, one from South Africa, and one did not report his/her country of residence. Table 8.2 is a summary of the demographics.
We analyzed the data using KMO and Bartlett’s test for sphericity to see if the data were appropriate for factor analysis. The KMO score was .95, indicating that the data were appropriate for factor analysis (χ2 = 1046.60; p < .001).
We conducted a principal component analysis on the 11 items suppressing scores below .40 and we found one factor that had an eigenvalue of 9.15 and explained 83.1% of the variance.
Since the 11-item scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of .98, we were comfortable with optimizing the scale by selecting the five highest loading items. We reran the principal component analysis and Cronbach’s alpha. The five-item scale had an eigenvalue of 4.55 that explained 91.0% of the variance and had a Cronbach’s alpha of .98. Table 8.3 shows the five items and the factor loadings.
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Bocarnea, M.C., Henson, J., Huizing, R.L., Mahan, M., Winston, B.E. (2018). Grounded Dependability: Leading with Faithfulness. In: Evaluating Employee Performance through Christian Virtues. Christian Faith Perspectives in Leadership and Business. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74344-8_8
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