MA Leadership: Critical Analysis of Leadership Styles (LDRS 500)

This essay provides a comprehensive critical analysis of three prominent leadership styles: servant leadership, transformational leadership, and authentic leadership. It begins by establishing the significance of leadership styles in organizational behavior and human interactions, emphasizing the leader's role in driving organizational success and employee development. The essay then delves into each leadership style, defining and exploring their core concepts and characteristics. Servant leadership, as coined by Robert Greenleaf, is examined, highlighting the leader's commitment to serving others and prioritizing their needs. Transformational leadership is discussed, focusing on its ability to inspire innovation and change within organizations, and its impact on employee motivation and productivity. Authentic leadership, which emphasizes self-awareness and honesty, is also explored, demonstrating its role in building trust and fostering positive relationships. The essay concludes by summarizing the key aspects of each style, providing a comparative analysis and highlighting their potential impact on organizational effectiveness and the development of individuals within the organization.

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Critical Analysis - Final Draft
MA in Leadership, Trinity Western University
LDRS 500 RJ: Leadership Foundations
Dr. Imbenzi Georege
Jan 30th, 2022

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Introduction
Leadership styles are an important issue in organizational behavior because of their role in
organizational and even individual development. In fact, leadership is the most critical issue in
organizational behavior and human interactions. A leader is constantly seeking for methods to
modify and improve in order to contribute to the success of people and the organization. To know
how to lead, one must first understand the types of leadership styles, so that by selecting one's
style, leader may take the appropriate approach to effective leadership, and also knows how to
interact with subordinates. An effective leader must create an inspiring vision for the future,
motivate and inspire people to engage with that vision, build a team, and guide it in achieving that
vision. Leadership can encourage employees to do their jobs and increase their productivity. The
leader always has loyal people who are ready to listen to him completely. An effective leader
guides his followers by setting the goals of the organization. In the organization, they define the
vision and set the path for successful achievement of organizational goals. Every organization
needs an active leader who will motivate them to work towards achieving organizational goals.
Good leaders build and maintain enthusiasm and confidence among their followers. They provide
guidance by which subordinates can clearly sense their abilities and characteristics. Effective
leaders cultivate team spirit and mutual understanding among their followers. Leadership
maintains order and inspires voluntary cooperation among followers. In general, leadership is not
an easy task and it should be known that not everyone can be a leader. But what matters is the
influence of the leader. A leader can lead to the success of the organization if he is guided correctly
and to failure if he is not familiar with his duties.
We will look at three types of leadership in this article: servant leadership, transformational
leadership, and authentic leadership.

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Section 1
 Servant leadership:
The term "servant leadership" was coined in 1970 by Robert Greenleaf in an article entitled
"Servant as Leader." This style of leadership is used as a long-term approach, in terms of making
changes in life and career. In this article, he points out that a great leader starts by serving others.
Therefore, proper leadership comes from a deep desire to help others, and great leaders act as
servants to meet the needs of employees, customers, and the community. In fact, the root of
leadership is a commitment to service. Greenleaf writes of the servant leadership process: “The
servant leader is servant first, it begins with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first,
as opposed to, wanting power, influence, fame, or wealth.”
The servant leader first meets the most important needs and priorities of the people. One shares
power with the team, identifying, prioritizing, and helping others develop and function as best they
can. Servant leaders believe that when their team members feel personal and professional
satisfaction, they produce higher quality and more efficient work.
It can be said that the idea of servant leadership is completely derived from the personality traits
of religious leaders in different religions. In the Bible, Christ is mentioned as the model of a servant
leader. In other religions, such as Islam, there are two key roles for leaders:
The first is service and support. A servant leader must always seek to serve his people, and the
slightest negligence in this regard calls into question his guiding personality. Such servant leaders
must always seek the comfort of their people and guide them according to their behavior and
actions. The idea of servant leadership has always been part of religion since the beginning of
Islam. The second is the conceptualization of servant leadership. Leadership is a process that
enables a person to influence others to achieve common goals, both for the individual and for the
organization. This definition is one of the main definitions in the field of leadership and is largely
true of servant leadership. The main and ultimate goal of a servant leader is to serve people by
investing in their upbringing and success, which ultimately leads to the performance of their duties
and goals.

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Here are some of the characteristics of a servant leader:
Self-awareness: It is the ability to look at oneself, to think deeply about one's feelings and
behavior, and to consider how it affects others. A leader can increase her self-awareness by
knowing her strengths and weaknesses and getting feedback from others. This self-awareness helps
the servant leader to put aside personal prejudices when making decisions.
Empathy: Knowing each person's unique perspectives and goals is a key point for a servant leader.
Because people need to pay attention to the specific spirits of each of them. A servant leader has
the ability to recognize and understand the feelings and emotions of his team and take care of them.
Listening: Servant leader must be actively aware of the demands and decisions of his team and
listen carefully to what they say and also reflect on their careers. This is essential for the growth
of the servant leader. They use active listening to solve problems, consult with others, and teach.
To improve listening skills, leader can pay close attention to people, pay attention to their body
language, do not jump in the middle of what they say, and show feedback on what they are saying.
Healing: Servant leaders have the potential to heal themselves and others. Many people may have
experienced various sufferings and injuries. Therefore, good ministerial leaders try to support such
people emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Persuasion: In servant leadership, persuasion methods are used to encourage people to do what
they want, instead of using force and coercion. It is also an attempt to reach a collective agreement,
and in this way everyone will support the decisions that are made. This way you can persuade them
without damaging the relationship and taking advantage of others. One way to convince is to use
expertise. If the leader is recognized as an expert, employees will be more interested in following
him.
Conceptualization: The servant leader should not be content with just small successes, but should
dream bigger visions. If the people of the organization are aware and optimistic about the future,
they will redouble their efforts to achieve it.
Commitment to the growth of people :The servant leader as emphasizing that each of employees,
in addition to the efforts they make, has a special intrinsic value. Such leaders are committed to

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the personal growth of each individual. He helps people develop the skills they need to do their
jobs efficiently.
Building community: The servant leader has the ability to create empathy in the group and
strengthen the focus of people on the same goal. Servant leaders create a sense of unity in the
organization; because they know that human beings inherently need to belong to a particular tribe.
In this way, they encourage them to share their opinions and join the team.
Foresight :The servant leader, based on past experiences and present realities, anticipates and
decides on possible future consequences. This foresight enables these leaders to plan ahead.
Stewardship: The servant leader must commit to meeting the needs of others first and taking
responsibility for the results of his team. In fact, this is the first and most important commitment
of the servant leader to the organization. He must lead his team by presenting specific role models
and resist misbehavior.
 Transformational leadership
Transformational leadership is a leadership style in which leaders encourage employees and
motivate them to innovate and make changes that help the company grow and succeed. This is
achieved by creating a sense of employee ownership and independence. This style helps to give
employees more space to be creative and find new solutions to problems. There are many benefits
to this leadership style, including job satisfaction, increased organizational productivity, and
reduced follower stress. Transformational leaders help their followers look at old issues from a
new perspective and inspire them to think beyond personal goals and interests and focus on larger
team and organizational goals. By presenting a vision for the future, these leaders have such an
impact on their followers that they take the vision as their own and work hard to achieve it.
Researcher Bernard M. Bass states that a transformational leader is one who empowers followers,
motivates them to perform beyond their expectations, and encourages them to follow the goals of
the group defines collective rather than personal interests.

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James McGregor Burns (1978) first introduced the concept of leadership change in his descriptive
research on political leaders. According to him, in transformational leadership, leaders and
followers help each other to reach a higher level of morale and motivation. According to Burns,
the difference between a leader and a manager is the difference in characteristics and behaviors.
He established two concepts: "transformational leadership" and "interactive leadership".
According to Burns, the transformational approach makes significant changes in the lives of
individuals and organizations. Redesigns perceptions and values and changes employees'
expectations and aspirations. This approach is based on the leader's personality, characteristics,
and ability to make a difference by articulating an energetic vision and challenging goals.
Transformational leaders are an ethical example of working for the benefit of the team,
organization, or community. Burns theorized that transformational and interactive leadership are
reciprocal styles. Interactive leaders do not usually try to change the culture in the organization,
but they do work in the existing culture, while transformational leaders can work to change the
organizational culture.
According to Bass, transformational leadership consists of four main components through which
leaders develop followers' performance:
Intellectual Stimulation: Transformational leaders strive to increase creativity in their
subordinates. The leader encourages subordinates to discover new and innovative ways of doing
things and new opportunities for learning.
Inspirational Motivation: Transformational leaders help subordinates gain the motivation,
stimulant, and confidence to achieve goals by charting future prospects and encouraging them to
do things beyond normal.
Individualized Consideration :Paying attention to others is one of the most important aspects of
transformational leadership. This has a positive effect on followers' satisfaction. These leaders
create a supportive environment in which they pay close attention to the needs of individual
followers and help them flourish. Individual considerations reflect leaders' efforts to treat everyone
as an important human being and their efforts to develop the potential capacity of their followers.
Idealized Influence: Transformational leaders are like role models for subordinates. Because
subordinates trust and respect the leader, they choose the leader as a role model and nurture his or

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her ideas within themselves. The transformational leader inspires a sense of admiration, loyalty,
and respect through ideal influence, and emphasizes the importance of a sense of collective
responsibility and strong commitment to achieving the organization's goal.
Finally, transformational leadership style is most effective when used appropriately, although it
may not be the best choice for all situations. In some cases, groups may need more authoritarian
management styles that are more in control and more oriented; this is especially important in cases
where group members do not have sufficient skills and need more supervision.
 Authentic Leadership
Research on authentic leadership has evolved over the past few years into organizational research
and leadership ethics. Authenticity actually refers to a person's honesty in relating to himself and
leading his true self, which in turn leads to the trust of others. Authenticity is also defined as
recognizing one's thoughts, feelings, needs, preferences, or beliefs. Authentic leaders not only have
traits such as self-efficacy, flexibility, optimism and hope, but they can also reinforce these traits
in employees. Authentic leadership is about people who are deeply aware of the quality of their
thinking and behavior. The attitude of others towards them is that these people are aware of the
values and intellectual perspectives, knowledge, and abilities of themselves and others and the
field in which they work; and they are confident, hopeful, optimistic and flexible, and have a high
moral character.
Authentic leadership has four main components.
Self-awareness: Authentic leaders are constantly striving to learn and grow in relation to
themselves. They know their strengths and weaknesses and work on them. These leaders know
their principles, values, and beliefs, review them, and act on them.
Balanced processing: Authentic leaders are able to analyze all relevant information before
making a decision. Authentic leaders need to consider the pros and cons of their decisions and
honestly consider both. Considering conflicting ideas about decision making can help clarify
shortcomings and prevent potential problems; In addition, balanced processing encourages
employees to share their views on workplace decisions.

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Relational transparency: Authentic leaders need to be transparent in their workplace
relationships and honest in expressing their thoughts and feelings. This may include providing
constructive feedback to team members if necessary and acknowledging their mistakes. Sharing
this information strengthens trust among followers in leaders.
Internalized moral perspective: Authentic leaders align their values with their intentions and
actions, so that there is a harmonization between the standards and the results achieved. Authentic
leaders always compare and evaluate their behavior with their ethical indicators in order to
maintain maximum compliance.
Finally, authentic leadership can only be built through self-knowledge and self-awareness, and
by relying on rich internal resources over the years of experience, study, counseling, and so on.
Many authentic leaders have faced very difficult situations at some point in their lives, and instead
of giving up, they have learned the lessons of that experience, and the same difficult conditions
have inspired the formation of their leadership style and mission. Research shows that leaders who
have positive traits and attitudes, goals, values, and strong personality traits have a positive effect
on the performance, behavior, and emotions of their followers. Also, a positive relationship has
been obtained between authentic leadership, psychological capital and creativity, leadership
effectiveness and positive psychological capabilities, organizational performance, commitment,
satisfaction, citizenship behavior and satisfaction of subordinates.
Section 2
In the following, we will analyze how the philosophy of servant leadership influences
organizational, in order to create an effective organizational culture and influence the leader's
decisions.
There is no definition for organizational culture that is generally accepted by all philosophers,
each philosopher has defined organizational culture with a different view of culture, so choosing
and specifying a single definition for it may not be correct and On the other hand, each organization

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has its own culture in which the organization has a definition or meanings. But in general, their
commonalities can be summarized as follows:
- The norms and values of organizational culture are common among the members of the
organization.
- Culture reflects the history of the organization.
- Organizational culture is a set of values, beliefs and convictions among members of the
organization.
- Culture is socially formed, that is created and maintained by a group of people who have formed
an organization together.
Organizations today seek to create an environment in which employees are satisfied with their job
and engage with it, sometimes even going beyond their duties. It also the environment reduces
exhaustion and the tendency of employees to leave work. Various factors influence the creation of
such job behaviors in the organizational environment. Here the role of leaders is significant in
causing such job behaviors. Organizational leaders can create positive or negative behaviors in
their employees. Leaders have different influences on employees' job behaviors by choosing
different leadership styles. One of the new approaches of leadership that is helpful in dealing with
the needs of employees and the organization is servant leadership.
According to Greenleaf, mentioned earlier, true leadership identifies those whose first motivation
is a deep desire to help others. Greenleaf sees the philosophy of doing this in caring for people and
believes that serving the people creates a good community. In his view, service itself should not
be a motivator for the leader, but he should pay attention to others and focus. Servant leadership
style is conceivable when a leader puts himself in a position to serve his followers and employees.
In other words, good leadership comes from deep desire to help others, and great leaders act as
servants to meet the needs of employees and the community. Servant leadership promotes the
appreciation of the people and their growth, the building of society, the exercise of honesty, the
provision of leadership for the benefit of the followers, and the participation in power and position.
According to Greenleaf, four fundamental principles can be stated for servant leadership. These
include serving others before paying attention to oneself, listening to others, building trust, and
nurturing employees to serve. Each of these features is described earlier.
This paper examines the relationship between servant leadership and several variables of
organizational behavior.

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One of these variables is job satisfaction. Job satisfaction means a set of feelings about one's job.
Employees who have job satisfaction have a positive feeling about their job and enjoy it. Job
satisfaction is one of the most important variables of organizational behavior and its improvement
has always been the goal of managers of organizations. Servant leaders help their employees
perform their duties better, give them decision-making responsibilities, trust their decisions,
develop their work skills, and make them feel good about themselves and their work.
Another case is burnout, which causes people to get tired and worn out in their jobs. It also
increases in stressful situations, which can result in depression. While causing a feeling of physical
weakness, low energy and it also becomes worthless. This feeling creates negative attitudes in the
person about himself, his work and his life in general. All of these issues cause a person to leave
work and absenteeism and cause job dissatisfaction, reducing the quality of performance in the
organization. In this regard, the leader's ability to be aware and understand the situation of people
and their work issues can prevent and reduce their degeneration. Leaders make an important impact
in this process by taking care of the physical and mental health of their employees. Leaders can
greatly prevent the formation of degeneration in their employees through emotional empathy with
employees, paying attention to ethics and prioritizing service to others and their interests.
Another issue is getting involved in a job in which a person is mentally and psychologically
engaged in his job and is immersed in it and attaches special interest and importance to his job.
When a person is busy with his work, he enjoys it and does not get tired. Such people become
overwhelmed with their work, consider the job as a part of their existence and attach great
importance to it. People who involve with work feel successful at work and believe that personal
and organizational goals are consistent with each other. Job involvement has a positive relationship
with variables such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship
behaviors, and performance. Organizational leaders have an important role to play in getting
employees involved in their jobs. The role of the leader in increasing the involvement of people
with jobs in the organization is related to formulating, communicating and redefining goals and
perspectives.
Another variable is hope and is formed based on the fact that a person feels that he has goals for
himself and has the ability to achieve these goals. Hope is an inner emotion and includes a strong

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will and energy in a person that causes him to have a strong mental focus in order to achieve goals.
High hope can be seen as an empowering factor. Hence, hope causes a person to stand and resist
in the face of difficulties and hardships. Hope in the organization increases organizational success
and performance. The high level of hope in the organization also helps to increase the health of
body and soul as well as reduce burnout and fatigue of employees. Leaders play an important role
in creating hope in the members of the organization. Effective leaders spread positive perceptions
of their followers by encouraging them to pursue goals. Leaders instill hope in their followers by
emphasizing their ability to change, and by using positive and inspiring communication.
The next variable is organizational self-esteem, which is the extent to which members of the
organization are able to meet their needs and have a sense of self-sufficiency and self-esteem in
the organization. Employees with higher self-esteem are satisfied with their role in the organization
and perceive themselves as important, respected, valuable and effective. Research shows that
organizational self-esteem affects variables such as performance, job satisfaction, organizational
citizenship behaviors and organizational commitment. Servant leadership instills in its employees
a sense of trust and worth, and by empowering them and empowering them to make decisions, as
well as helping to align their goals with the goals of the organization, instills a sense of self-
sufficiency, value and self-esteem in its followers.
The other two organizational variables, organizational commitment and intention to leave the
job, are related, because both variables are related to how people perceive their relationship with
the organization. Intention to leave the job means how much a person cares about leaving the job
or organization and is looking for new job opportunities. Conversely, organizational commitment
is associated with a reduced desire to leave the organization. Organizational commitment is seen
as a condition in which people feel attached to the organization and wish to remain members of
the organization and, in fact, identify with the organization. Servant leadership creates a sense of
love, trust and altruism for employees to find a positive feeling in the organization. Serving and
empowering employees by the servant leader increases the desire of employees to stay in the
organization. Creating an inspiring and positive outlook also makes employees feel useful and
motivated to work, and not only do they not think about leaving the organization, but also become
deeply committed to the organization.

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Another important variable that has recently received much attention and has been introduced as
the main dependent variable of organizational behavior is organizational citizenship behaviors.
Organizational citizenship behaviors are voluntary behaviors of employees that are not part of their
official duties and are not directly considered by the formal reward system of the organization, but
increase the effectiveness of the organization. Research shows that organizational citizenship
behavior is directly related to organizational performance and effectiveness. So far, factors such
as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational identity, organizational justice,
trust, types of leadership (especially transformational leadership), and the relationship between
leader and follower and as factors that create organizational citizenship behavior have been
considered.
In total, changing organizational culture is not an easy task. Employees often resist change and
can speak out against a new culture. Therefore, it is the task of leaders to convince their employees
of the benefits of change and of collective experiences with new behaviors, and to explain to the
collection the paths that lead the new culture to the best way to succeed.
Conclusion
The goal of all leads of organizations and institutions is to improve and use efficiently and
efficiently from various resources such as labor, capital, energy and information. A balanced work
environment and a competent workforce are among the essentials that leads must pay attention to
in order to grow. All human efforts in organizations are ultimately to achieve excellent
performance, and in this way the human factor is one of the most important.
There is a positive and significant relationship between servant leadership and organizational
trust and it has an effect on employee empowerment. It can be said that the main purpose of servant
leadership style is to improve organizational leadership, develop learning and growth
opportunities, build interpersonal relationships and build trust. But most managers do not have
such characteristics and therefore it is suggested that servant leaders do so.
Other results of the study indicate that there is a positive and significant relationship between
effective leadership and job attitudes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job
participation and reducing the stability of retirement. Accordingly, when work is meaningful to