Exploring Servant Leadership: Theories, Styles, and Applications

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of servant leadership, comparing it with other leadership styles such as relational and charismatic leadership. It evaluates the usefulness of servant leadership in both for-profit and non-profit organizations, highlighting its advantages such as enhanced team collaboration, social commitment, and better decision-making processes. The essay also discusses the effectiveness of servant leadership in specific industries, emphasizing qualities like listening, foresight, and strong manager-employee relationships. Furthermore, it explores how servant leadership integrates leader roles with employee responsibilities to achieve organizational goals. The conclusion reinforces that servant leadership prioritizes employee needs, leading to improved outcomes compared to other leadership approaches.

Running head: LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND STYLES 1
Leadership Theories and Styles
Name:
Institution

LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND STYLES 2
Introduction
Servant leadership is not a leadership style but a leadership approach. As a servant leader,
a person should focus on the needs of other people rather than their needs. This leads to
enhanced trust, stronger relation and higher engagement among team members and stakeholders.
This report compares servant leadership with other leadership styles and its efficiency in
profitable and non-profitable business organizations.
Question 1
a) Why were they leaders?
These people were leaders because they could inspire trust from people around them
through physical example and by having honest communication (Parris & Peachey, 2013).
Additionally, these people were leaders because they continually looked to improve and evolve.
b) Do you think their personality or their skills were most responsible for their
effectiveness at being a leader?
Personality has got adverse impacts on a person’s life since it regulates the manner which
they interact with others. Personality’s big five factors include intellectance, dependability,
emotional stability, agreeableness, and surgency. These five personality traits results to effective
leadership performance.
c) Consider the differences in being a servant and being a leader. Are there situations in
which these two concepts can merge?

LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND STYLES 3
A servant gives priority to the interests of other people while a leader does not prioritize
on the interests of the team members. The two concepts at times merge because the servant and
the leader seek for opportunities to partner with groups as well as people in addressing
environmental, societal, and company’s issues.
Question 2
a) Compare and contrast servant leadership with the other leadership styles. Provide a
detailed explanation for your evaluation that demonstrates clear, insightful critical thinking.
In terms of inclusivity, relational leadership style basically emphasizes on bringing the
staff together for a variety of viewpoints. However, the servant leadership style does not concern
itself with building inclusivity within the work setting. In this case, relational leaders aim at
combining diverse workforce’s cross-section such that all the viewpoints of a goal are considered
(Black, 2013). On the other hand, charismatic leadership makes use of consistent communication
strategies in communicating unconventional vision aimed at offering a solution rather than on the
status quo.
b) Evaluate the usefulness of servant leadership to both for-profit and non-profit
organizations. Provide a detailed explanation for your evaluation that demonstrates clear,
insightful critical thinking.
Servant leadership assumes that involving the people who are to implement a particular
policy in the process of decision-making creates a better understanding along with the
implementation of the formulated policies (Carter & Baghurst, 2014). Servant leadership has got
several advantages to both for-profit and non-profit companies. For instance, people mostly work

LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND STYLES 4
as a team to attain a common goal, hence minimizing the rate which competitive attitudes occur
among people (Liden, Wayne, Liao & Meuser, 2014). As a result of making decisions together,
there is an enhanced social commitment between people and this is helpful since it increases
individuals’ commitment to the decisions made. When decisions are made by several people,
better decisions are made compared to when a decision is made by a single person.
c) How effective would servant leadership is in your particular business or industry?
In an industry, servant leadership refers to the qualities of a servant leader such as
listening, foresight persuasion, and manager-employee relationships (Choudhary, Akhtar &
Zaheer, 2013). Servant leadership, in this case, is effective since employees are required to
remain connected with customers as well as the developments of the industry and exercise
empathy by taking the clients’ point of view (Van Dierendonck, Stam, Boersma, De Windt &
Alkema, 2014). Servant leadership motivates the staff to develop products that are of value and
high-quality.
d) How useful is servant leadership to your own leadership role?
Among the primary roles of a leader include inspiring trust by becoming a credible leader
that people admire to follow, creating a clear vision, executing strategy that ensures consistency,
and coach potential by unleashing every person’s ability to enhance performance, grow careers,
and solve problems. Servant leadership assists leaders to integrate their roles and the employees’
responsibilities to ensure that goals and objectives are achieved.
Conclusion

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Servant leadership is considered to be better when compared to other leadership styles
such as transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, or moral leadership. This is because
servant leaders focus more on the employees’ needs rather than their interests. Both for-profit
and non-profit companies, servant leadership helps in coming up better decisions since it
involves many individuals.

LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND STYLES 6
References
Black, G. L. (2013). Correlational analysis of servant leadership and school climate. Journal of
Catholic Education, 13(4), 3.
Carter, D., & Baghurst, T. (2014). The influence of servant leadership on restaurant employee
engagement. Journal of Business Ethics, 124(3), 453-464.
Choudhary, A. I., Akhtar, S. A., & Zaheer, A. (2013). Impact of transformational and servant
leadership on organizational performance: A comparative analysis. Journal of business
ethics, 116(2), 433-440.
Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Liao, C., & Meuser, J. D. (2014). Servant leadership and serving
culture: Influence on individual and unit performance. Academy of Management
Journal, 57(5), 1434-1452.
Parris, D. L., & Peachey, J. W. (2013). A systematic literature review of servant leadership
theory in organizational contexts. Journal of business ethics, 113(3), 377-393.
Van Dierendonck, D., Stam, D., Boersma, P., De Windt, N., & Alkema, J. (2014). Same
difference? Exploring the differential mechanisms linking servant leadership and
transformational leadership to follower outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(3), 544-
562.