This article is about a Hong Kong-based summer internship program designed to foster service leadership attributes through service-learning. We report research based on interviews with interns and their partner organization representatives (PORs) and on written assignments as required by the program. We also report how the research informed the redesigning of the program. The research identified factors that support service leadership emergence, including servant leadership by PORs; appropriate intern responsibilities; support from other stakeholders; and interns' possession of a secure knowledge foundation. Conservation of resources (COR) theory underpins our explanation of how these factors enhance service leadership emergence, while self-determination theory (SDT) also explains the impact of servant leadership by PORs. We conclude by explaining the subsequent actions that have been taken to leverage the supportive factors.
The classical literature on Confucianism exhorted leaders to practice five core virtues as the basis for becoming a noble person (Junzi) and for sustaining harmonious communities built on trust and good example. We present a theory about how the senior management in modern corporations, by enacting the five Junzi virtues through virtuous environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and practices, might inspire virtue-based relationships between superiors and subordinates and between employees. We argue that if middle managers and employees observe and experience that their firm’s ESG policies and practices are virtuous, they would feel encouraged to practice those virtues in their own behavior, and thus embody and promote interpersonal harmony. We provide three types of illustration for our theory. First, we map the five Junzi virtues to the content of a specimen ESG report. Second, we map seven subtypes of servant leadership behavior of middle managers to the five Junzi virtues. Third, we map seven types of employee organizational citizenship behavior to the five Junzi virtues.
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