Servant Leadership Essay

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Servant Leadership, Authentic Leadership, and Race-Ethnicity and Gender Social Identity Effective leadership, commonly regarded as both a learned skill and innate ability, is an essential characteristic of successful organizations (Northouse, 2016). Great leaders are said to define purpose, create a vision for the future, set high ethical standards, and guide their organizations through many circumstances and into new directions (Morrill, 2007; Parris & Peachey, 2012). Leadership is also described as complex – it can mean different things to different people. Given there is no standard approach to leadership, scholars focus on the process of leadership as opposed to the definition (Northouse, 2016). As a process, leadership is not simply possessing …show more content…

Greenleaf used a series of essays to coin the term in the 1970s (Mittal & Dorfman; 2012, Northouse, 2016). Greenleaf regarded servant leadership as a way of life rather than a management technique, describing it as an inward lifelong journey guided by the natural feeling one has to serve others first (Parris & Peachey, 2012). Centered in altruism, servant leadership is the only leadership approach grounded in the principle of caring for others (Northouse, 2016). Today, scholars widely believe the conceptualization of servant leadership as a human calling delayed empirical research (Northouse, 2016; Parris & Peachey, 2012). According to Parris and Peachey (2012), even Greenleaf admitted servant leadership is unorthodox and therefore difficult to operationalize. Those in academia struggled with how to appropriately test servant leadership given its presentation as a philosophy; however, the erosion of confidence in contemporary business leadership, couched in numerous recent business scandals, led to a renewed and increased interest in the theory (Mittal & Dorfman, 2012; Parris & Peachey, …show more content…

To date, the majority of research on servant leadership consists of developing modern theoretical frameworks. These frameworks, as shown by Northouse’s (2016) model of servant leadership (see appendix Figure 1) outlines necessary existing environmental and personal conditions, behaviors of servant leaders, and servant leadership outcomes. According to Northouse (2016), while no general consensus regarding servant leadership exists, the current framework is comprised of the overlap of key characteristics and attributes from the findings of Laub (1999), Wong and Davey (2007), Dennis and Bocarnea (2005), Barbuto and Wheeler (2006), Sendjava, Sarrs, and Santora (2008), and van Dierendonck and Nuijten (2011). Research has also focused on establishing measurement tools, such as the Servant Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), with the intention that future scholars can utilize it to explore servant leadership in practice (Northouse, 2016; Parris & Peachey,

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