Leadership Research Summary:
• Notwithstanding the proliferation of servant leadership studies with over 100 articles published in the last four years alone, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its theory development. The study provides an integrative and comprehensive review of the 285 articles on servant leadership spanning 20 years (1998–2018), and in so doing extend the field in four different ways. First, the study provides a conceptual clarity of servant leadership vis-à -vis other value-based leadership approaches and offers a new definition of servant leadership.
• Second, researchers evaluate 16 existing measures of servant leadership in light of their respective rigor of scale construction and validation. Third, researchers map the theoretical and nomological network of servant leadership in relation to its antecedents, outcomes, moderators, mediators. The study finally concludes by presenting a detailed future research agenda to bring the field forward encompassing both theoretical and empirical advancement. All in all, the review paints a holistic picture of where the literature has been and where it should go into the future.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
• With over 200 studies having been published on servant leadership, researches are now able to provide substantial advice for practitioners. The consistent positive relationships found between servant leadership and valued outcomes (even when controlling dominant forms of leaderships, such as transformational and LMX) at the individual level (e.g., individual citizenship behaviors, task performance, creativity), team level (e.g., team potency, team performance), and organizational level (e.g., customer satisfaction, return on investment) provide strong evidence in favor of selecting and training leaders to practice servant leadership.
• It appears that servant leadership is especially well-suited for organizations that desire long-term growth profiles designed to benefit all stakeholders (as opposed to a focus on short term profits for shareholders only). Practitioners need to understand that servant leadership has an indirect influence on organizational outcomes. Servant leaders focus on providing for followers so that they reach their full potential, become empowered to handle tasks and decisions on their own, and who adapt to communal sharing and a culture of serving others. With such a culture in place, customers are well-served by employees. Customer satisfaction results in loyalty to the organization in the form of repeat purchases and promotive voice, which in turn translates into revenue growth and higher stock prices.
• Along with the many benefits of servant leadership, practitioners must be prepared to exert tremendous effort in developing a servant leadership culture, starting with themselves as role-models. Prioritizing the needs of followers is in many ways counter to humans’ survival instincts that are driven by a focus on self-interest. It takes discipline for servant leaders to minimize these instincts within themselves through role-modelling, and within their followers through encouragement of sharing and helping among followers.
• Because servant leadership is difficult to master, it requires deliberate and continuous practice to maintain a servant leadership orientation. As with other endeavors that require a long obedience in the same direction, however, it is worthwhile, because the benefits of developing strong bonds of mutual trust between leaders and followers pay dividends to organizations. That is, followers want to engage in the behaviors that help fellow workers, customers, and the organization.
• The study suggests that building a servant leadership culture requires a combination of selecting pro-socially motivated conscientious people, combined with servant leadership training. Selection is important because there is a limit to how much training can change individuals’ stable personality characteristics. For example, regardless of the quality of a training program, researchers contend that it is unlikely that self-centered, dogmatic, narcissistic people can be trained to be other-centered, sensitive, empathetic, socially sensitive servant leaders. And as with virtually every major organizational change, moving an organization from a command and control culture to one based on servant leadership will take several years to complete. Thus, organizations attempting to implement servant leadership cultures need to be patient.
• In response to this increased interest in servant leadership and the proliferation of studies, our objectives for this paper were four-fold. First, the study reviewed how servant leadership was understood within the leadership literature and offered a clear definition of servant leadership. Second, the study presented a critique of the measures used in servant leadership research, concluding that the Liden et al., 2015, Liden et al., 2008, Sendjaya et al., 2018, Sendjaya et al., 2008, and van Dierendonck et al. (2017), van Dierendonck and Nuijten (2011) measures were the only measures that had gone through rigorous process of construction and validation. Third, the study mapped the nomological network of servant leadership research offering scholars an overview of what has been studied thus far. Finally, the study detailed a research agenda targeted specifically to improve how the field studies servant leadership.
• The review has demonstrated that the servant leadership field has made progress in the last 20 years, however, the field of servant leadership still has its critics. Namely, as there are still lingering questions the conceptual and empirical overlap between servant leadership and transformational, ethical and authentic leadership and there are criticisms about how much the existing research in this field can tell us as it is restricted by its own limitations in research design.
• Researchers believe that it would be premature to hit the restart button on the field. Many of the problems have arisen from poor construct clarity, poor measurement, and poor design. Researchers hope by heeding the advice offered in this review to resolve these problems, the servant leadership research can move forward and continue to offer significant insights to the leadership field over the next 20 years.