Servant Leadership: A Management Style for Organizational Behavior

This essay discusses the pros and cons of using servant leadership as a management style for organizational behavior. It explores the benefits of servant leadership, such as improved employee satisfaction and performance, as well as the challenges, including a lack of willingness to adopt the style and vagueness in objectives and goals.

Running Head: SERVANT LEADERSHIP 0
Organizational Behavior
Servant Leadership: a management style
(Student Details:)
12/11/2018

Servant Leadership 1
Organizational Behaviour
The essay is intending to provide an understanding of the applicability of
organisational behaviour in the workplace through critical reading and writing,
analysis as well as argumentation skills. The essay argument is ‘a servant leadership
management style is the best approach for managing people in organisations’.
Hence, a discussion about the pros and cons of this argument will be a major part of
this essay. Servant leadership is that leadership style in which managers consider
themselves as the supporters and cheerleaders. The managers utilize their power
and leadership skills in order to support their co-workers, as their major goal is to
serve others before their own agenda (Rouse, 2018). Besides, servant leaders are
capable to evolve the culture of a firm over time. In this way, we will research over
servant leadership in a way that it’s both sides can be uncovered and analysis can
be done which will provide an effective understanding about the desired
organizational behaviour at the workplace (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011).
Being a great a leadership philosophy, servant leadership is based on the belief that
efficient leaders often strive to serve others, than ensuing power or taking control
over others. Here others can comprise partners, customers, fellow employees as
well as the community. Facts as per the research demonstrating that the servant
leader is servant prior the leader as we know that it always starts with the obvious
feeling that everyone wants to serve the community and others (Rouse, 2018).
Afterwards, conscious selection brings someone to wish to lead. Moreover, a servant
leader is apparently different from the one who is leader first with distinct qualities so
that he can serve the organization in a better way.
If we will try to find the difference in between other leadership styles and servant
leadership then according to (Hales, 2018) Greenleaf's approach servant leadership
emphasises on captivating responsibility for the desires and needs of others for
supporting ethical leadership that ultimately impulses leaders for showing respect for
the dignity and values of their assistants (Rouse, 2018). Additionally, a servant
leader is distinct to other leaders in following ways:
 Listening skills: a servant leader strive for identifying the willpower of the
group as well as assists in clarifying that will of his sub-ordinates.

Servant Leadership 2
 Healing skills: servant leaders understand well, the part of their leadership
responsibility is helping in growing whole employees hence their sense of self
is impaired.
 Empathy: servant leaders always anticipate the positive intentions of their co-
workers and they do not discard them as people (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt,
2011).
Likewise, there are many more quality attributes such as awareness,
conceptualization, persuasion, foresight, commitment for the development of people,
stewardship and community building attitude of a servant leader distinguishes him
from other leaders. Hence, these above ten principles of the servant leadership are
the foundations of this management style those are pre-requisite for managing and
leading people in organisations effectively. Therefore, evaluating these above
positive skills of the servant leadership style, it can easily be defined that servant
leadership is the best approach to manage the human force in an organisation
(Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011). However, while looking into diverse
organisational structures, many issues or challenges of the servant leadership has
been found which will be discussed in the below parts of the discussion. On the other
hand, there are countless benefits of servant leadership like employees who have
been treated with respect will be more loyal to the firm, and they provide an
improved service to the organization's customers as well as come frontward with
their innovations and new ideas (Zheng et al., 2010).
Moreover, research on the superiority of servant leadership over others depicts that
someone who contemplates himself to be a servant of the peoples who follow him, is
carries the properties of a servant leader. It means that a servant leader totally
belongs as well as works for his sub-ordinates that makes him sincere, selfless and
a true leader. Moreover, servant leadership exist in all scenarios like in a government
office, business organization or anyone else who is having a position of power.
Hence, a servant leader has many primary skills and characteristics as mentioned
above which differentiate him from rest leaders, as stated by Greenleaf (McDermott,
2017). A servant leadership management style is a way of behaving being a
manager and it has been embraced since a long time from the leaders in
organisations. A servant leader focuses on organization’s goals rather than put
emphasis on their personal goals. The servant leadership management style from

Servant Leadership 3
natural instigated feelings rather than operational characteristics of a leader in an
organisation. The strategy behind this leadership is that by fulfilling changed
interests and needs of its employees, an organisation is capable to establish their
objectives and targets through their whole potential (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt,
2011).
Analysis of the critical research on servant leadership has been resulted in useful
pros and cons of a servant leadership management style (McDermott, 2017). Thus,
analysis is demonstrating that pros of servant leadership are more than cons of the
same. However, this leadership style is not perfect either, as it is run by the human
beings only and in a system driven by humans, mistakes are inevitable.
Being a unique and advantageous management style, servant leadership is used in
organisations for getting advantages like it develops dedication and confidence
among employees as well as forms more engaged and responsible teams, family-
like environment. Servant leadership advances work-life balance as well as profits
and earnings in an organization. According to (Colquitt et al., 2011), by applying
servant leadership at the workplace a leader can potentially plan for serving their
sub-ordinates at first that is the major benefit of this management style to the
organisations. Besides, the above will later provide satisfaction to the employees of
the organisation, and which will further lead to enhanced productivity as well as
performance. Moreover, it is also analysed through the research accompanied from
the surveys on the employees functioning in a medium sized restaurants chain, and
the benefits of servant leadership style has been characterised. As per the analysis,
in that restaurant a servant leader directed their sub-ordinates’ efforts towards
attending peoples and customers first, rather than focusing on accomplishing their
self-goals (Management Study Guide, 2017). In this way, that serving culture of their
organisation openly impacted their restaurants’ overall performance as well as the
professional attitude of their employees in the organisation (Livesey & Kate, 2008).
Furthermore, the above are the pros of the servant leadership which ultimately led to
improved job-satisfaction, enhanced employee-job enactment and minimized rates of
absence as well as the turnover of the organisation was boosted considerably.
Contrary, the servant leadership management style is having few of the negative
sides over the managing function of employees that is affecting the overall

Servant Leadership 4
performance of business organisations negatively (Hales, 2018). As we know that
servant leadership is all about the nature and behaviour of the leaders, hence it is a
challenge to find such organizational managers as well as leaders who are willing to
act selflessly (Jones, 2013). Additionally, other cons of the servant leadership in an
organisation include the dearth of willingness by leaders for adopting the servant
leadership style into their practices, timescale, lack of power, vagueness in the
objectives and goals. Moreover, there are many more cons of implying servant
leadership for managing people in an organisation. One of them is stated that the
servant leader being a higher authority might affect the employees’ thinking as well
as performance negatively (Goetsch & Davis, 2014). Besides, the leaders in an
organisation usually carry high power and authority for communicating as well as
dealing with the people of the organisation; therefore they may get indulged into
enjoying high levels of independence that further hinders the competitive advantages
of the organisations over others. According to (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009) it is been
specified that the employee satisfaction aspect plays an intermediating role amid the
main relationship of employee loyalty and servant leadership. Moreover, an
experiential study conducted in China also revealed that use of well-structured
equation model in the organisations decides the effectiveness of the servant
leadership style there (Cooren et al., 2011). It means that servant leadership is
correlated positively with the employees’ loyalty as well as satisfaction, thus its
effects are also affected through these factors considerably, which creates
dependencies and conflicts (Burke et al., 2015).
In conclusion, it has been analysed through the research conducted here that
servant leadership style is a way of leading human force which needs leaders to
emphasize other peoples and employees first in any organisation. Besides, servant
leadership is the management style which focuses on progressive development of
the supporters by building autonomy, trust and healthy relations with organisational
fellows. Likewise, management of people in any organisation is typically assisted
through involvement of employees as well as strategic decision-making in the
working of the organisations. Therefore, almost all pros and cons of the servant
leadership management style have been discussed efficiently, that led to the
summary of making modifications as well as implementing effective strategies aiming
to improve performance of the organisations.

Servant Leadership 5
References
Burke, R.J. et al., 2015. Organizational Empowerment Practices, Psychological
Empowerment and Work Outcomes Among Frontline Service Employees in Five-
Star Turkish Hotels. Effective Executive, 18(1), p.42.
Colquitt, J., Lepine, J.A., Wessaon, M.J. & Gellatly, I.R., 2011. Organizational
behavior: Improving performance and commitment in the workplace. London:
McGraw-Hill Irwin.
Cooren, F., Kuhn, T., Cornelissen, J.P. & Clark, T., 2011. Communication,
organizing and organization: An overview and introduction to the special issue.
Organization Studies, 32(9), pp.1149-70.
Goetsch, D.L. & Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational
excellence. New Jersey: Pearson.
Hales, J., 2018. THE PROS AND CONS OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP. [Online]
Available at: http://blog.zingtrain.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-servant-leadership
[Accessed 10 December 2018].
Jones, G.R., 2013. Organizational theory, design, and change. London: Pearson.
Livesey, S.M. & Kate, K., 2008. "Transparent and caring corporations? A study of
sustainability reports by The Body Shop and Royal Dutch/Shell." Organization &
environment, 15(3), pp.233-58.
Management Study Guide, 2017. Popular Theories of Organizational
Communication. [Online] Available at:
https://www.managementstudyguide.com/theories-of-organizational-
communication.htm [Accessed 04 December 2018].
McDermott, , 2017. The Top 7 Management Styles: Which Ones Are Most Effective?
[Online] Available at: https://www.workzone.com/blog/management-styles/
[Accessed 10 December 2018].
Putnam, L.L. & Nicotera, A.M., 2009. Building theories of organization: The
constitutive role of communication. London: Routledge.

Servant Leadership 6
Rouse, , 2018. servant leadership. [Online] Available at:
https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/Servant-Leadership [Accessed 10
December 2018].
Savage-Austin, A.R. & Honeycutt, A., 2011. Servant leadership: A phenomenological
study of practices, experiences, organizational effectiveness, and barriers. Journal of
Business & Economics Research, 9(1), pp.49-54.
Zheng, W., Yang, B. & Mclean, G.N., 2010. Linking organizational culture, structure,
strategy, and organizational effectiveness: Mediating role of knowledge
management. Journal of Business research, 63(7), pp.763-71.