Seeking and measuring the essential behaviors of servant leadership

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of how servant leadership is established and transmitted among members of an organization. The second goal was to identify and evaluate the unique actions by a leader essential to establishing servant leadership. The authors' efforts resulted in identification and validation of ten leader behaviors that seem to be essential to servant leadership. Design/methodology/approach -The authors' methodology consisted of two stages. In the first stage, The authors developed an item pool of 116 items drawn from previously developed operationalizations of servant leadership. The authors then engaged a panel of 23 researchers attending a conference focused exclusively on the study of servant leadership to evaluate the. Each participant was asked to independently rate each item using a four-point scale where 1 ¼ not useful in describing servant leaders and 4 ¼ contributes greatly to describing servant leaders. The authors retained only the most highly rated items. This resulted in retention of 22 leader behaviors for further analysis. In the second stage, the authors developed a questionnaire including these items as well as items measuring transformational leadership behaviors, transactional leader behaviors, servant leadership as measured by the instrument developed by Liden et al. (2008), and a measure of leadership effectiveness developed and used by Ehrhart and Klein (2001). The questionnaire was placed in internet-based survey software and the link provided to students and faculty at a private mid-Atlantic university and to university alumni and colleagues in a variety of organizations. Each respondent was asked to describe a leader he/she had worked for in the past five years and included specification of the job role for both the respondent and the leader. Findings -The ten-item scale accounts for 75 percent of the variance with a scale reliability α ¼ 0.96. Convergent validity was determined through comparison to Liden et al. (2008) measure of servant leadership. Discriminant validity was established through confirmatory analysis of leader effectiveness, transformational leadership's four dimensions, a measure of transacti...

Organizational Commitments Are Mediation of Relationships Between Servant Leadership and Employee Performance

“…Winston and Fields (2015) assessed and measured the important behavior of servant leadership; the results indicate that servant leadership has a relationship with performance. Chan and Wai-ming (2014) examined the impact of servant leadership on trust, attitudes and employees; the results show that servant leadership has a positive impact on employee performance.…”

“…Winston and Fields (2015), Chan and Wai-ming (2014), Retmono (2013), Krisna and Kripa (2012), and Melchar and Bosco (2010), suggest that servant leadership can have an impact on performance. However, Rocco (2016) has found that servant leadership does not necessarily result in an increase in employee performance.…”

Exploring a model of servant leadership, empowerment, and commitment in nonprofit organizations

“…Previous studies (e.g., Reid et al, ; Van Winkle et al, ) have shown this measure to exhibit good internal reliability. Winston and Fields () report evidence of convergent validity with Liden et al’s () servant leadership measure, as well as discriminant validity from measures of transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness. In this study, Cronbach's alpha was .92.…”

“…Servant leadership has received growing interest from leadership practitioners and researchers (Parris & Peachey, ), including nonprofit scholars (Palumbo, ; Ronquillo et al, ). Greenleaf () states that servant leadership starts with the leader's desire to serve and focuses on the follower through “facilitating follower performance and development” (Winston & Fields, , p. 414). Similar suggestions have been made about effective nonprofit executive leaders who are focused on their board members' needs, who facilitate their board members' performance, are responsive to their stakeholders, and who lead beyond the boundaries of the organization (Herman, ).…”

“…Criticisms of servant leadership point to the reality that not all leaders will be able to or want to adopt this style, that this style might not suit some organizations' context or culture, and that not all followers wish to be recipients of servant leadership (Northouse, 2016;Ronquillo, 2011). Servant leadership has consistently been contrasted with transformational leadership in efforts to distinguish the concepts, to confirm divergence of measured concepts, and to benchmark servant leadership against the more researched transformational leadership concept and measures (Liden et al, 2008;Parolini, Patterson, & Winston, 2009;Ronquillo, 2011;Smith, Montagno, & Kuzmenko, 2004;Stone, Russell, & Patterson, 2004;Winston & Fields, 2015). Winston and Fields (2015) offer, "while transformational leaders focus on the well-being of the organization, servant leaders focus on the well-being of the employee" (p. 414).…”