[5] The contemporary researchers continue to explore the viability of Spiritual Intelligence (often abbreviated as "SQ" or "SI") and to create tools for measuring and developing it.
However, in his 2009 doctoral dissertation, Yosi Amram found that the self-reported measure of spiritual intelligence predicted leadership effectiveness as rated by outside observers.
Studies by other researchers have shown that leaders’ SI can predict a variety of positive outcomes, such as financial performance of their organizations.
Variations of spiritual intelligence are sometimes used in corporate settings as a means of motivating employees[9] and providing a non-religious, diversity-sensitive framework for addressing issues of values in the workplace.
Frances Vaughan offers the following description: "Spiritual intelligence is concerned with the inner life of mind and spirit and its relationship to being in the world.
"[16] Cindy Wigglesworth defines spiritual intelligence as "the ability to act with wisdom and compassion, while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the circumstances.
"[19] King further proposes four core abilities or capacities of spiritual intelligence: Also, Vineeth V. Kumar and Manju Mehta have also researched the concept extensively.
Operationalizing the construct, they defined spiritual intelligence as "the capacity of an individual to possess a socially relevant purpose in life by understanding 'self' and having a high degree of conscience, compassion and commitment to human values.
[21] Applications of the ISIS by other researchers has shown that “the reliability of ISIS was high (i.e., Cronbach’s alpha = 0.97)” and that there was "a significant positive relationship between employees’ spiritual intelligence and work satisfaction.”[22] It consists of twenty-two sub-scales assessing separate SI capabilities related to Beauty, Discernment, Egolessness, Equanimity, Freedom, Gratitude, Higher-self, Holism, Immanence, Inner-wholeness, Intuition, Joy, Mindfulness, Openness, Practice, Presence, Purpose, Relatedness, Sacredness, Service, Synthesis, and Trust.
The idea behind the development of this scale was to generate and assess the concept of spiritual intelligence in the collectivist culture bounded with eastern philosophy.
[27] The 29-item Spiritual Intelligence Questionnaire: This test was normalized by Abdollahzadeh (2008) with the collaboration of Mahdieh Kashmiri and Fatemeh Arabameri on students.