Leadership, Servant

Conceptual Overview

Greenleaf's 1977 essay entitled the “The Servant as Leader” is accredited as the foundation work from which the theory of servant leadership has emerged. In his essay, Greenleaf credits Herman Hesse's The Journey to the East as the source of his ideas about [Page 786]servant leadership. For Greenleaf, servant leaders begin with the natural feeling that they want to serve first; then they make a conscious choice to lead. He argues that such a leader is sharply different from one who is a leader first; the difference is manifest in the care taken by the servant leader to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being addressed. Greenleaf adds that the test of success for servant leadership is to ask, do those served grow as persons? Do they, through the service of the leader, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

While serving first is the defining characteristic of servant leadership, Greenleaf proposed several other attributes that are necessary for successful servant leadership; these included

• listening—servant leaders are able to listen to followers while at the same time directing them;
• empathy—they always maintain a sense of empathy toward followers;
• imagination—they have the ability to imagine and have the innovative capacity to provide vision;
• intuition—they must have a honed sense of intuition; and
• foresight—they must have the foresight necessary to make decisions that their followers will respect and benefit from.

The ideas that Greenleaf puts forth in his essay have idealistic, moral, and religious overtones. In regard to religion, other writers in the field suggest that even though Greenleaf was accredited with the founding work in servant leadership, he was not the first individual to introduce the concept; these writers attribute this to Christianity's founder, Jesus Christ. They argue that from narrative accounts of Jesus's life in the Bible, it is evident that he taught and practiced servant leadership more than 2000 years ago. These writers go further by asserting that since then the practice of servant leadership has been echoed in the lives of ancient monarchs. For centuries, monarchs have consistently espoused that they are in the service of their people; even modern coronation ceremonies and inaugurations of heads of state indicate a service to God, country, and the people, as noted by Sendjaya and Sarros in 2002. Interestingly, the servant leadership literature offers little by way of critique in regard to the disparity between the words and the deeds of such monarchs, a disparity that is echoed in history.

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