Demystifying Servant Leadership

Abstract

The servant leadership approach is the less travelled road of leadership. In the final analysis, it is not an outward leadership behaviour or skill, but an internal character of the heart. It is a matter of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. This character-focused approach is what makes servant leadership distinct from other leadership models, and explains the proliferation of empirical studies in the field since the turn of the millennium. Complementing the explosion of empirically rigorous studies in servant leadership is the increase of anecdotal evidences of servant leadership practices in high-performing companies reported in the media and popular press. Typically, companies such as Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, TDIndustries, Synovus, and ServiceMaster are cited (Gergen, 2001; see also Chapter 11). While these corporate practices can be downplayed as isolated cases, as critics may suggest, servant leadership has spurred curiosity beyond the capacity of scholars to keep pace, either theoretically or empirically.