Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy in which the goal of the leader is to serve. A servant leader shares power, puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people.
When leaders shift their mindset and serve first, they benefit as well as their employees in that their employees acquire personal growth, while the organization grows as well due to the employees' growing commitment and engagement. Since this leadership style came about, a number of different organizations including Starbucks and Marriott International have adopted this style as their way of leadership.
According to a 2002 study by Sen Sendjaya and James C. Sarros, servant leadership is being practiced in some of the top-ranking companies, and these companies are highly ranked because of their leadership style and following.
History
Before the modern popularity of the concept of "leadership", the autocratic enlightened absolutist King Frederick II ("the Great") of Prussia () famously portrayed himself as "the first servant of the state".
The roots of the concept can be seen in much earlier texts. For instance, the Bible contains the following teaching of Jesus Christ:
Robert K. Greenleaf first popularized the phrase servant leadership in "The Servant as Leader", an essay published in 1970. In this essay, Greenleaf explains how and why he came up with the idea of servant leadership, as well as defining a servant leader. Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, stated in an interview:
"Greenleaf credited his reading of Hesse's 1932 book, Journey to the East, as the personal source of inspiration in his coining the term, 'servant-leader' in his 1970 essay, The Servant as Leader."
In Journey to the East, the main character, named Leo, is a servant just like all the others. All the servants work well together, until one day when Leo disappears. When the servants realize that things are not the same without Leo, they came to the realization that Leo was far more than a servant – he was actually their leader.
Greenleaf came to the realization that a newfound leader should be someone that servants or workers can relate to. with the publication of the first peer-reviewed servant leadership scale, and since then, over 270 peer-reviewed articles have been published across 122 academic journals. The year 2008 was a significant year in servant leadership research with the publication of two seminal papers by Sen Sendjaya, James C. Sarros, and Joseph C. Santora as well as Liden, Wayne, Zhao, and Henderson,
Greenleaf's original formulation
The most important characteristic in being a servant leader, according to Greenleaf, is making one's main priority to serve rather than to lead. According to Ginny Boyum, Greenleaf proposed that servant leaders should serve first, make the needs of others their main priority, and find success and "power" in the growth of others; summarily, "A servant can only become a leader if a leader remains a servant".
Greenleaf's definition left much room for speculation because it lacks specifics. Servant leadership is handled throughout the literature by many different dimensions.
Despite several conceptual papers on the topic of servant leadership, there is no consensus on empirical research for the servant-leadership construct until a state-of-the-art review published in 2020 by Nathan Eva, Mulyadi Robin, Sen Sendjaya, Dirk van Dierendonck, and Robert C Liden
- Researchers Barbuto and Wheeler created a dimension called "the natural desire to serve others", by combining the 10 characteristics of Spears. These researchers developed operational definitions and scales to measure 11 potential characteristics of servant leadership. Factor analyses reduced this scale to five unique dimensions: altruistic calling (four items), emotional healing (four items), wisdom (five items), persuasive mapping (five items), and organizational stewardship (five items). This framework specified the fundamentals to servant leadership and was consistent with Greenleaf's original message. Among these five dimensions, altruistic calling is most aligned with ethics.
- There are also researchers such as Russell and Stone who reviewed the literature and proposed nine 'functional' attributes of servant leadership (vision, honesty, integrity, trust, service, modeling, pioneering, appreciation of others, and empowerment) and eleven 'accompanying' attributes (communication, credibility, competence, stewardship, visibility, influence, persuasion, listening, encouragement, teaching, and delegation). They also argued that the servant leader must be a teacher to develop their followers, and that values and core personal beliefs were the antecedents to servant leadership. six-item composite of the Servant Leadership Behavior Scale (SLBS-6) which uniquely contributes a spiritual dimension, a distinguishing feature that makes servant leadership a truly holistic leadership approach relative to other positive leadership approaches.
Critiques of servant leadership
Critiques of Greenleaf
Various critiques of servant leadership have been made. In one such critique, Sendjaya and Sarros used the same Bible account as Akuchie, and made the claim that Jesus Christ, not Greenleaf, introduced the notion of servant leadership to everyday human endeavor. They argued that this leadership principle was so important to Christianity that it was captured by all four authors of the Canonical Gospels. The researchers argued that servant leaders have a particular view of themselves as stewards who are entrusted to develop and empower followers to reach their fullest potential. However, Sendjaya and Sarros' research work did not propose a testable framework nor did this work distinguish between this and other leadership styles. Similarly, Black scholars have pointed out how notions of servants as being subjugated and mistreated is largely absent from servant leadership discourse. Black scholars also note that although Greenleaf attributes his ideas to Hermann Hesse, Martin Luther King Jr. preached similar approaches and was a contemporary of Greenleaf in the United States, but King is never mentioned in any of Greenleaf's original works. A 2021 paper published in the Journal of Management History explained why servant leadership poses a number of risks and limitations, particularly with regard to ethical issues and dilemmas.
Employee organization commitment
While organizations thrive based on the work produced by the employees, the commitment of the employees to the organization is a major contributor to how well an organization functions. Research shows that management style is a main factor in sales person turnover. According to Kashyap and Rangnekar, servant leadership molds organizations and builds a positive image for the organization. Servant leadership lessens the feeling of being "drained of inner resources", so employees experience an increase in work-to-family positive spillover (WFPS). Moreover, employees feeling that their needs are made a priority in the workplace, as well as the feeling of being satisfied with their interactions at work on a daily basis, has an impact on their family's experience with them as they shift from the work role to the family role. With this trait, studies have shown that servant leaders have the ability to influence their employees to achieve their own goals as well as their work goals due to their leaders empowerment, and this plays a major role in their continued success and growth. Studies have shown this in that the less strain on the employee and the more they assimilate at the organization, the better their psychological health. servant leadership's "bottom-up" style, or prioritizing the needs of the employees first, causes employees to be more engaged in their work in that they feel that they have social support from their leader as well as their colleagues. aids in the employees' ability to express themselves in the workplace. In turn, this nurturing leads to them returning the same nurturing towards their co-workers and making the workplace a suitable environment for employee growth, as well as the production of good quality work to grow the organization. Acceptance refers to having different personalities, personal views, and values as employees, and understanding that employees are not perfect. Although servant leadership was proposed many years ago, it is still considered a "newer" theory among many other theories because of the switch in focus from the traditional leadership theories.
However, as demonstrated by Eva, Robin, Sendjaya, van Dierendonck, and Liden's review, research has established servant leadership as a valid construct that is worthwhile researching and implementing.