Category: Unit 4

Servant leadership is first originated by Greenleaf in his essay in 1970.

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that           one wants to serve, to serve first.” -Robert K. Greenleaf  (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2016)

In traditional leadership, leaders use his “power” to influence their followers, whereas  in servant leadership,  leaders share his power and put the followers first, empower them, and help their full personal capacities as high as possible (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2016; Northouse, 2019, p. 225) For that, servant leadership is more focus on leader’s behaviors rather than their traits.

Many scholars tried to conceptualized servant leadership in many ways. Spears(2002) identified 10 special behaviors which are the essential components of servant leadership from Greenleaf writings.
1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of people
10. Building community

Awareness in servant leadership is different from emotional intelligence or self-awareness concept because it is more followers- oriented. With awareness in servant leadership, leaders are able to step aside and reflect themselves and their situations in the big picture.

The model of servant leadership created by Liden, Panaccio, et al. consists of three components: antecedent conditions, servant leadership behaviors and out come.  As same as Spear’s definition, the 7  behaviors of leaders are the center of this model : conceptualizing, emotional healing, putting followers first, helping followers grow and succeed, behaving ethically, empowering, and creating value for the community. These behaviors are influenced by antecedent conditions such as context and culture, leader attribute and follower receptivity. Also The result of servant leader’s behaviors is shown as outcome such as create healthy organizations that nature individual growth, strengthen organizational performance, and  finally it produce a positive impact on society.

Servant leadership improve an organization over the long term, however its weakness is it takes time to show outcomes.

Reference

Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. (2016). What is servant leadership? Retrieved from https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Transformational leadership is the  part of the “New Leadership” concept which put more emphasis on intrinsic motivation and follower development emerged by Burns. (Northouse, 2019). Before transformational leadership concept emerged up, we have often used traditional style of leadership which is called as transactional leadership. Transactional leadership focuses on the exchanges between leaders and their followers.  Leaders use rewards to make followers do something for them(Northouse, 2019). Transactional is very basic leadership style and still now we can see it in everywhere at any level.

Whereas transformational leadership is the next level of leadership, which inspire followers to share the vision, motivate them, and “help followers reach their fullest potential”(Northouse, 2019).   There are seven components of leader’s behavior which are thought to be consist of transformational leadership; Idealized Influence (II), inspirational motivation (IM), intellectual stimulation (IS), individualized consideration (IC), contingent rewards(CR), management-by-exception(MBE), and laissez-faire(LF). They can be evaluated with Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire(MLQ).

Because transformational leadership demands leaders to be a good role model for followers and appeal ideal and morals to raise the level of morality in followers, transformational leaders often connected with charismatic personal traits. In the past,  Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi are known as famous transformational leaders. All of these great leaders inspired people by their ideal belief, words and actions to move people’s to bring new concepts.