Introducing the Concept and Components of Religious Buffering in Organizations

The purpose of this study is to design a conceptual framework for religious buffering in organizations. Religious buffering is a new term, the inefficient literature on which led the researchers to conduct in-depth interviews with 13 academic experts in the field of theology and organizational behavior management through a grounded theory for proposing a comprehensive and coherent model of the issue. The validity of the interview protocol was confirmed by measuring the face validity and content validity, and its reliability was achieved by agreement between two coders. Clarifying the nature of religious buffering, the final model distinguished the causal, underlying and intervening factors which influence this method and introduced strategies and positive consequences of the fulfillment of religious buffering along with its negative consequences. The results revealed that religious buffering contains a multifaceted concept identifiable at four mental, functional action level, social action level, and functional levels. It was also found out that the religious buffering is composed of specific factors which are predictable to some extent. Finally, this study introduces strategies of the performance of religious buffering and its context and consequences.