Divine leadership creates the most positive and satisfying work environments for employees, and in return the companies that practice this style of leadership generate the highest financial success. According to Garcia-Zamora (2003), a Harvard Business School study selected, from a list of 207 leading corporations, ten companies that placed a strong emphasis on showing appreciation for employees and ten companies that did not and then compared their profitability over an eleven-year period. They found that the companies with strong employee appreciation experienced dramatically higher profitability and in some cases they outperformed those without by 400 to 500% in terms of net earnings, return on investment, and shareholder value. Aburdene (2005) cites the example of a Watson Wyatt Worldwide study that surveyed 400 public firms. The companies with the most employee-friendly practices, such as flextime and an emphasis on employee development, generated stock market returns of 103 percent over five years while companies with the fewest generated returns of only 53 percent. Similarly, the winners of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” contest, which surveys employees’ satisfaction with how they’re treated by their company, consistently outperformed the broader market by 300 percent over the last seven years (Aburdene, 2005). Sirota, Mischkind and Meltzer (2005) point out that for many years, generally the same companies appear on both Fortune’s “America’s Most Admired Corporations“, which is based on business performance and on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”.
