Organizational Behaviour and Management: Servant Leadership Essay

This essay delves into the concept of servant leadership, exploring its practices, advantages, and limitations within an organizational context. It begins by defining servant leadership as a philosophy and set of practices focused on serving others, building better organizations, and fostering a caring world. The essay highlights key traits of servant leaders, such as empathy, listening, awareness, and conceptualization, and discusses how these traits can be applied at different organizational levels to improve outcomes. It provides examples of how servant leadership can be effective in service organizations, emphasizing its positive impact on employee motivation and performance. The essay also acknowledges the potential disadvantages of servant leadership, such as the time-consuming nature of decision-making and the need for retraining, and suggests that it may not be suitable for all organizational contexts, such as those requiring rapid decision-making or major changes. Overall, the essay argues that servant leadership, with its emphasis on serving people, is a beneficial approach to managing people in organizations.

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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT
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8/16/2019
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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT 1
Servant leadership
Leading a group of people can be a challenging activities as this include making followers do the
work as per the guidance and help to work along the way by their own will. Leadership is one of
the skills that exist with a person when they are born and as per the leadership theories, the traits
can be developed at a later age as well. There are various leadership styles like autocratic
leadership style, democratic leadership style, laissez faire leadership style, situational, and
servant leadership. The essay discusses servant leadership; it is the set of practices and
philosophy that includes building a better organization, individual’s lives and eventually develop
a more caring world. The major focus of a servant leader is to serve instead of search for
personal benefits or thriving their organization. Some of the key traits that are observed in the
servant leader are empathy, listening, awareness, healing, persuasive, conceptualization,
foresight, stewardship, and building community (Anderson, 2010). The key objective of the
essay is to understand the advantages and key cons of the servant leadership over other
leadership style that would be included as the part of the discussion further.
As discussed previously, there are various leadership styles, where the service leadership can be
used and applied to each organizational level. The key traits have been discussed previously,
which may be applied at a different level. Like in case of executive level, listening s one of the
critical traits that need to exist as at the executive level if the leader is listening would be able to
gain more prominent insights into the problem and conduct of business activities and take and
issue pertinent within the organization. When compared to autocratic leadership who tends to
order and make people done the work without listening to them as they consist the tendency to
order and dominate (Brenner, 2015). Through this, it can be said that the servant leadership pons
would be an effective and positive change in the organization due to good listening and
understand capability. Empathy trait of servant leader turns out to be one of the major pons
when it comes to a middle level manager. In order to ensure that the teams of middle level
managers are having the right facilities and equipment to conduct the activities and work
properly, the empathy is one of the major trait required. At this level, the managers who are able
to understand their team members situation and put their shoes in other place to feel their pain
and feelings. They would be easily able to manage the work through their team members as they
would be knowing exactly how to get work done considering their personal interest as well

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT 2
(Miner, 2015). This would increase the physiological safety among the people and feel free to
share their onions. People are also able to share their opinions in case of democratic leadership as
well but they are aware in that case that eventually the decision is in hands of the leader who
could sympathize but would not be able to show empathy to the team members, which would
make servant leadership better used at this stage. The third level is team level where awareness is
one of the characters of servant leadership that is used in the organization and turns out to be one
of the pons for servant leadership. At the team level, it is important for the employees to know
their role in the organization in accomplishing mission and objectives of the company, for which
the awareness is one of the major traits, required that is applied by the servant leadership. They
would also provide freedom among the team to allow them to show their creativity in order to
achieve organizational goals. This may be similar to that of in case of laissez faire leadership, but
the major issue is that the decision making power are in hands of a team instead of the leader,
that may adversely impact the quality of the work performed due to lack of awareness
(agilevelocity, 2019)
The ways through which better outcomes can be achieved in an organization with the help of
servant leadership can be understood with the example of a service organization. A service
organization majorly depends on the quality of performance by the human resource of the
company. For this, it is important to understand the customer needs requirements, behavior, and
expectations that will lead to the customer satisfaction. Servant leadership is the style where the
major focus is over serving the people, which would make the performance fit to the
organizational needs (Antonakis et al., 2009). The reason being the empathy is one of the major
advantages that exist among the servant leader that will lead to providing the service as per the
customer’s requirement after understanding personally their expectations like in case of health
care business with the patients. Moreover, the performance can be improved through the servant
leadership of the team, the reason being the leader will understand and work for the personal
motives of every individual of the team that will provide psychological safety and highly
motivated employees reflecting better performance by the employees and depicts achieving
better outcomes for the organization (D’Innocenzo, 2016).
Some of the process and practices of servant leadership identified in an organization are
conceptualization that is one of the reasons for being an effective leader. As per this practice, a

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT 3
servant leaders are going through the organization thoroughly (Edelman, 2017). This reflects that
the awareness of the servant leader would be really good as he is going through all the aspects of
the organization thoroughly which will make him understand the mission, complexity, internal
and external environment of the organization which will eventually increase the performance of
the organization and makes him an affected leader. Emotional healing is another pons or practice
adopted by the servant leader, which affects the follower’s behavior. As per this process, it
includes a leader being sensitive to the well-being and personal concern of others that could be
its team members, customers and other stakeholders in the organization. Through this leader will
make people respect and love him and listen to their leader while depicting the positive behavior
of the followers (sagepub, 2019). Another practice of servant leadership includes putting
followers first which will also affect the follower’s behavior towards the leaders and regarding
the performance in the team. This trait of servant leadership reflects that he is more concerned
about its followers and consider it as a priority while getting the work done from the followers
the interest of the followers and their success are important to a servant leader. This also reflects
in his decision-making and will positively affect the follower’s behavior as they would also
prefer to listen to their leader (Jesus, 2015).
Some of the disadvantages or limitation that has been identified for servant leadership are
decision may take a longer time as compared to other leadership styles like authoritative or
Democratic. Therefore, it can be said, that servant leadership may not be suitable in some of the
organization where instant decision-making is required (Koryak, 2015). The reason being due to
servant leadership the corporation can get stuck into different perspective and research which
could eventually slow down the process implementation and could result in to in Greece and cost
of the company or decline in revenue. For example in case of senior level managers what top
management team needs to bring major change into an organization in order to sustain the
organization which may be racist it or not acceptable by the employees at the beginning. Since
the decision-making is generally based on the benefit of all, servant leadership in such situation a
servant leadership may not be suitable as this decision-making could be harsh and in benefit of
an organization only (Jing, 2016). Other than this, one of the other cons of being servant
leadership is it may require retraining. An organization that is willing to implement servant
leadership may require a large amount of money and need to spend time retraining their human
resource in order to reframe how to think in a particular way. Most of the organizations are

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT 4
working for the benefit of their own however, servant leadership is more concerned regarding the
social and ethical behavior within an organization. This may be the case of a nonprofit
organization but in case of a corporation which is working in order to gain revenue and increase
the profit margin, the servant leadership may not be suitable and could limit the leadership style
effectiveness (DuBrin, 2016).
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that there are various pros and cons of servant
leadership, which would be more inclined towards the advantage of this leadership style.
Through this, it can be said that discussion inclined to words a servant leadership management
style, which is said to be the best approach for managing people in the organization. The key
discussion done in the favor of this phrase included some of the traits that turn out to be the
advantage in servant leadership are empathy, awareness, listening and some practices that
include conceptualizations, empathy healing, putting followers forward. However some of the
concept identified for the servant leadership were longer time could be taken in decision-making,
may require retraining, may not be suitable where instant decision making is required like in case
of major change and innovation in the organization. The ways through which better outcomes
can be achieved in an organization with the help of servant leadership can be understood with the
example of service organization as servant leadership is the style where the major focus is over
serving the people.

ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND MANAGEMENT 5
References
agilevelocity, 2019. 3-ways-to-use-servant-leadership-in-your-organization. [Online] Available
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Anderson, B., 2010. Project leadership and the art of managing relationships. T&D, 64(3), pp.59-
63.
Antonakis, J., Dasboroughc, M.T. & Ashkanasy, N.M., 2009. Does leadership need emotional
intelligence? The Leadership Quarterly, 20(2), pp. 247-261.
Brenner, S.O., 2015. Leadership style and the process of organizational change. Leadership &
Organization Development Journal, pp.2-16.
D’Innocenzo, L., 2016. A meta-analysis of different forms of shared leadership–team
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DuBrin, A.J., 2016. Leadership: research findings, practice, and skils. 8th ed. Mason, OH:
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Edelman, P.J., 2017. Training leader emotion regulation and leadership effectiveness. Journal of
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Jesus, D., 2015. "The role of knowledge-oriented leadership in knowledge management practices
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Jing, F.F., 2016. Missing links in understanding the relationship between leadership and
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Koryak, O., 2015. Entrepreneurial leadership, capabilities and firm growth. International Small
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Miner, J.B., 2015. Organizational behavior 1: Essential theories of motivation and leadership.
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sagepub, 2019. Chapter_10_Servant_Leadership. [Online] Available at:
https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/90166_Chapter_10_Servant_Leadership.
pdf.