Northouse, Leadership 9e

SAGE Publishing, 2022

Lecture Notes
Chapter 10: Servant Leadership
Learning Objectives
10-1 Describe servant leadership.
10-2 Explain how servant leadership works.
10-3 Discuss the strengths of servant leadership.
10-4 Discuss the criticisms of servant leadership.
10-5 Recognize applications of servant leadership.

Annotated Chapter Outline

I. Description
a. A seemingly paradoxical approach to leadership.
1. In reality, offers a unique perspective.
2. Until recently, little empirical, peer-reviewed research has been done.
3. Most academic and nonacademic explorations of the subject have been prescriptive rather than
descriptive.
b. Servant leadership is an approach focusing on leadership from the point of view of leaders and their
behaviors.
1. Emphasizes that leaders be attentive to the concerns of their followers, empathize with them,
and nurture them.
2. Specifically, put followers first, empower them, and help them develop their full personal
capacities.
3. A “moral” form of leadership.
c. Servant Leadership Defined
1. Several definitions from a variety of perspectives.
2. Servant leadership: Leadership that begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to
serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead…The difference manifests itself in
the care taken by the servant—first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are
being served.
3. As defined by Greenleaf in 1970.
d. Basic ideas of servant leadership:
1. Placing the good of followers over one’s own self-interests.
2. Emphasis on follower development.
3. Strong moral behavior towards followers, the organization, and other stakeholders.
4. Can be innate or developed.
e. Historical Basis of Servant Leadership
1. Robert K. Greenleaf is the author of seminal works in the field.
2. Continued influence on the development of servant leadership as a theory.
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3. Based on Hermann Hesse’s 1956 novel The Journey to the East, in which travelers on a mythical
journey are significantly impacted and unified by the presence of a menial servant.
4. Greenleaf believes the servant leader has a social responsibility to be concerned about the
“have-nots” and underprivileged.
1) Servant leaders must attempt to remove inequalities and social injustices.
2) Servant leaders use less institutional power and control while shifting authority to
those who are being led.
f. Servant leadership values community because it provides a face-to-face opportunity for individuals to
experience:
1. Interdependence.
2. Respect.
3. Trust.
4. Individual growth.
g. Ten Characteristics of a Servant Leader
1. Listening: Interactive communication between leaders and followers.
2. Empathy: “Standing in the shoes” of another person and assuming their point of view.
3. Healing: The act of making the whole.
4. Awareness: A quality that makes servant leaders acutely attuned and receptive to their
physical, social, and political environments.
1) Includes understanding oneself and the impact one has on others.
5. Persuasion: Clear and persistent communication that convinces others to change.
6. Conceptualization: An individual’s ability to be a visionary for an organization, providing a clear
sense of its goals and direction.
7. Foresight: Encompasses a servant leader’s ability to know the future.
1) Has an ethical dimension where leaders hold responsibility for failure to reasonably
anticipate and act on potential outcomes.
8. Stewardship: Taking responsibility for the leadership role entrusted to the leader.
9. Commitment to the growth of people: Treating each follower as a unique person with intrinsic
value that goes beyond the individual’s tangible contributions to the organization.
1) Includes a commitment to aiding each person’s personal and professional growth.
10. Building community: Fostering the development of community, or a collection of individuals
who have shared interests and pursuits and feel a sense of unity and relatedness.
1) By fostering development of a safe space to connect where individuality is
encouraged, servant leaders foster a growth environment.
h. Building a Theory About Servant Leadership
1. In their undeveloped, loosely defined form, Greenleaf’s writings were widely accepted as a
leadership approach, rather than a theory, that has strong heuristic and practical value.
1) Went scientifically unverified for more than thirty years.
2. More recently, researchers have begun to examine the conceptual underpinnings of servant
leadership in an effort to build a theory about it. This has resulted in countless models
incorporating a multitude of variables.
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SAGE Publishing, 2022
1) Russell and Stone (2002) developed a practical model of servant leadership that
contained 20 attributes, 9 functional characteristics (distinctive behaviors observed in
the workplace), and 11 accompanying characteristics that augment these behaviors.
2) Patterson (2003) created a value-based model of servant leadership that
distinguished 7 constructs that characterize the virtues and shape the behaviors of
servant leaders.
3) [Insert Table 10.1 Key Characteristics of Servant Leadership]
3. A literature review by Coetzee, Bussing, and Geldenhuys (2017) reduced servant leadership to 8
servant leadership characteristics, 4 competencies, 10 measures, and 3 outcomes.
i. Coetzee et al.’s eight characteristics of servant leadership:
1. Authenticity.
2. Humility.
3. Integrity.
4. Listening.
5. Compassion.
6. Accountability.
7. Courage.
8. Altruism.
j. Model of Servant Leadership, based on Liden, Wayne, Zhao, and Henderson (2008) and Liden, Panacci,
Hu, and Meuser (2014) that has three main components:
1. Antecedent conditions: Existing conditions which impact servant leadership.
1) Context and culture: The organizational context and culture within which servant
leadership occurs and is influenced.
2) Leader attributes: Qualities and disposition of the leader that influence the servant
leadership process.
3) Follower receptivity: The desire for servant leadership, which influences the extent of the
impact of servant leadership on workplace outcomes.
i. In cultures where power distance is low (e.g., Nordic Europe) and power is shared
equally among people at all levels of society, servant leadership may be more
common.
ii. Emotional intelligence, or the leader’s ability to monitor the feelings, beliefs, and
internal states of the self and followers, has been identified as an important
attribute for a leader implementing a servant leader ideology.
iii. Not all followers desire a servant leader.
iv. May see servant leadership behaviors as micromanagement.
v. Recent attempts to get to know them, help them, develop their abilities, or guide
them.
vi. However, when servant leadership was matched with followers who desired it, it
had a positive impact on performance & organizational citizenship behavior.
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2. Servant Leader Behaviors

1) Conceptualizing: Servant leader’s thorough understanding of the organization—its

purposes, complexities, and mission.
2) Emotional healing: Being sensitive to the personal concerns and well-being of others.
i. Includes recognizing others’ problems and addressing them.
ii. Making oneself available to others, standing by and supporting them.
3) Putting followers first: Defining characteristic of servant leadership, in which leaders use
actions and words that clearly demonstrate to followers that their concerns are a priority,
including placing followers’ interests and success ahead of those of the leader.
4) Helping followers grow and succeed: Knowing followers’ professional or personal goals
and helping them to accomplish these aspirations.
i. Aiding individuals to become self-actualized and reach their fullest human
potential.
5) Behaving ethically: Doing the right thing in the right way.
i. Servant leaders will not compromise their ethics for success.
6) Empowering: Allowing followers the freedom to be independent, make decisions on their
own, and be self-sufficient.
i. builds followers’ confidence in their own capacities to think and act on their own
because they are given the freedom to handle difficult situations in the way they
feel is best.
7) Creating value for the community: Consciously giving back to the community.
3. Outcomes
1) Follower performance and growth: An expected outcome in which followers achieve
greater self-actualization.
i. Followers will realize their full capabilities when leaders nurture them, help them
with their personal goals, and give them control.
ii. May improve in-role performance as well.
iii. fosters a positive service climate, & reduces turnover.
iv. Supports followers eventually themselves becoming servant leaders.
2) Organizational performance: An expected outcome in which followers, follower
performance, and overall performance as an organization increase due to servant
leadership.
i. Linked to organizational citizenship behaviors, or extra role behaviors that benefit
the organization.
ii. enhanced team effectiveness by increasing the shared confidence among team
members that they could be effective as a work group.
iii. increases team potency when present, but decreases when servant leadership is
absent—the valuable support needed to accomplish a goal is missing.
3) Societal impact: An expected outcome of servant leadership, which is an overall positive
impact on society.
i. Not commonly measured in studies, but highly visible in everyday life.
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k. Summary of the Model of Servant Leadership

1. Model of servant leadership consists of three components:

1) Antecedent conditions.
2) Servant leader behaviors.
3) Outcomes.
2. The central focus of the model is the seven behaviors of leaders that foster servant leadership:
1) Conceptualizing.
2) Emotional healing.
3) Putting followers first.
4) Helping followers grow and succeed.
5) Behaving ethically.
6) Empowering.
7) Creating value for the community.
3. These behaviors are influenced by:
1) Context and culture.
2) Leader’s attributes.
3) Followers’ receptivity to this kind of leadership.
4. When individuals engage in servant leadership, it is likely to improve outcomes at the
individual, organizational, and societal levels.

l. How Does Servant Leadership Work?

1. Unique mechanism focuses on the behaviors leaders should exhibit to put followers first and to
support followers’ personal development.
1) Concerned with how leaders treat followers, and the outcomes that follow.
2. When many leaders in an organization adopt a servant leadership orientation, a culture of
serving others within and outside the organization is created.
1) Servant leadership works best when leaders are altruistic and have a strong
motivation and deep-seated interest in helping others.
2) Important that followers are open and receptive to servant leaders who want to
empower them and help them grow.
3. Underlying philosophical position that leaders should be altruistic humanists.
1) Should share power and enable growth and autonomy in others.
i. Leadership framed from this perspective downplays competition in the
organization and promotes egalitarianism.
4. Ideally, servant leadership results in community and societal change.
1) Individuals within an organization who care for each other become committed to
developing an organization that cares for the community.
i. Builds commitment to helping those in need outside of the organization.
m. Strengths
1. Unique in its central focus on ethical leadership.
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1) Argues unabashedly that leaders should put followers first, share control with
followers, and embrace their growth.
2) Servant leadership is better at predicting employee performance and attitudes.
i. Holds promise as a stand-alone theory that can help leadership researchers and
practitioners better explain employee performance and attitudes than other
recent approaches.
2. Counterintuitive and provocative approach to the use of influence, or power, in leadership.
1) Unusually deemphasizes influence and power as negative qualities shown in
leadership.
i. Leaders should not dominate, direct, or control.
ii. Leaders are encouraged to share control and influence.
iii. Results in servant leadership’s existence as a conceptually and empirically
distinct concept from other approaches.
3. Consideration of multiple stakeholders, including followers, organizations, customers,
communities, and societies, and the outcomes that result.
1) Followers are served by actions and decisions of leaders.
2) Outcomes such as work–family balance have been linked to servant leadership.
3) Those following servant leaders are more spiritually aware while at work.
4) Stakeholders also extend beyond the organization’s followers and customers to the
broader community.
4. No implications that servant leadership is a panacea.
1) Admits there are conditions under which servant leadership is not a preferred kind of
leadership.
i. Less effective when followers are not open to being guided, supported, and
empowered.
2) Servant leadership may be more effective at higher levels.
5. Multiple ways to assess servant leadership.
1) A review of servant leadership research identified 16 different measures of servant
leadership.
2) Servant Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ) was developed and validated by Liden et al.
(2008).
i. Studies support its uniqueness and independence from other constructs.
n. Criticisms
1. Paradoxical nature of term “servant leadership” may diminish its impact.
1) Seems whimsical or fanciful due to contradictory name.
2) Mechanism of influence in servant leadership is neglected in the approach.
2. Not clear how servant leadership is related to organizational change.
1) Servant leadership is positively related to psychological empowerment, but may not
result in followers engaging in extra-role performance (organizational citizenship)
above and beyond that accounted for by leader–member exchange (LMX).
i. Similar findings in work engagement.
3. Disagreement on core dimensions of the process.
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1) Researchers cannot reach consensus.
i. Definitions may be confusing to leaders and scholars alike.
4. Prescriptive overtone to literature.
1) While advocating an altruistic approach to leadership is commendable, it has a
utopian ring.
i. Conflicts with individual autonomy and other principles of leadership such as
directing, concern for production, goal setting, and creating a vision.
5. Unclear reasons for inclusion of “conceptualizing” as a servant leadership behavior.
1) Debate on whether it constitutes an ability, behavior, or skill.
2) Lack of evidence to justify it as a defining characteristic of servant leadership.
6. Application
7. Applicable at all management levels and in all organizational types.
1) Prescribed behaviors are easy to understand and follow.
8. Used extensively in existing training programs.
1) Straightforward and accessible content.
9. Use in the selection process can contribute to a servant leadership culture within an
organization.
1) Organizations should focus on selecting people who have high integrity and strong
ethics.