Leadership plays a key role in enhancing employees’ capability and innovativeness (Luthans, 2002). The emphasis of leadership has been shifted now a day towards enhancing motivation and social responsibility to gain long term success (Leavy, 2015). Servant leadership plays an important role in this respect. The theory of servant leadership was first introduced by Greenleaf (1977). Research on servant leadership has highlighted that it is one of the people management technique that helps business organizations to develop and maintain a competitive advantage (Newman et al., 2015). In reality do we find such leaders in corporate world and what training should be provided to rising leaders to prepare such leaders i.e. servant leaders
Timothy Lynn Burchfield provided an eloquent endorsement of the concept this way: "Those who serve (vs. power or buy) their way to influence leave a huge legacy to those around them."
Servant leadership (SL) is experienced so rarely because of trends in the leadership environment, the scarcity of human qualities required, demands that the practice places on the practitioner, and the very nature of the practice itself.
Several commented that SL requires qualities that are all too rare, such as "cardinal virtues" (Katherina Lange), a "paradoxical combination of courage AND humility," (Lisa Slayton), "(a) high degree of self control… " (Ashok Jain), and "validation needs (that) have largely been met … (making it) very challenging for younger people to be servant leaders" (Mike Gatliff). Personal characteristics that get in the way of SL include "Ego (that) makes it difficult to 'want to serve'" (Randy Hoekstra), "greed" (Madeleine York), and "An unhealthy desire to control" (Judesther Marc).
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-isnt-servant-leadership-more-prevalent
According to Larry C. Spears, former president of the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, these are the 10 most important characteristics of servant leaders:
Listening.
Empathy.
Healing.
Awareness.
Persuasion.
Conceptualization.
Foresight.
Stewardship.
Commitment to the growth of people.
Building community.
I think that we have, to a certain limit, servant leaders in corporate sector.
Polarized thinking removes options from reality; there is no middle ground. It means we (but more likely they) must be perfect or we (but more likely they) will be failures. In truth, we will not find servant-leaders—anywhere—if we set the bar so high no one can ever be worthy of the title.
There is no need to limit ourselves to two-choice arguments: we will find more servant-leaders than we ever thought existed if we stop asking for the moon (and in so doing may even contribute to their development).
I have written on the subject of servant leadership: see (i) Exercising Servant Leadership, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254582899_Exercising_Servant_Leadership, (ii) Informal Authority and the Enduring Appeal of Servant Leaders, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267752827_Informal_Authority_and_the_Enduring_Appeal_of_Servant_Leaders, and (iii) Take Me To Your Followers, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267752750_Take_Me_To_Your_Followers.
Article Exercising Servant Leadership
Article Take Me To Your Followers
Article Informal Authority and the Enduring Appeal of Servant Leaders
Mahatma Gandhi is an example
World over people are trying to emulate his leadership.But it is tough and needs great courage and character.
Ms Jeevan,
This is indeed an interesting topic. I am researching on a new business excellence model that is based on people. I have mounted all the variables of the model and it is being validated by quantitative analysis.
Indeed during my research I have come across different cases of servant leaders. Everything in the enterprises starts with leadership. I am coming up with the hypothesis that leadership should not only possess human values but should also have spiritual values. Even Confucius has his own concept of a leader. Spiritualisation of business.
Business is work and according to spiritual researches like Ranganathananda there in no other source than the Bhagavat Gita which addresses properly the attitude towards work. The modern servant leaders should inspire themselves from such lofty teachings.
Moreover , it is a global requirement nowadays eg WRAP certificate that leaders comply with social and human dimension of an enterprise.
I have seen many enterprises with servant leaders and will shed more light in my coming articles. The experts above are absolutely right. I will go a little further
In my post "Servant leadership" I wrote:
To serve obviously means to be subjected to someone. And how could a leader (the first among the people) be positioned inferiority? To lead means to guide, to direct, or to take the initiative in an action for others to follow. Serving means to subdue. The subdued person cannot be, at the same time, able to take responsibility for the taken decisions that are obligatory for others to follow or execute.
http://leadershipbyvirtue.blogspot.si/2014/11/servant-leadership.html
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