Servant Leadership

Early in my career as a teacher, I began to wonder if a model of leadership I saw in the Christian Scriptures and evident in leaders I respected would transfer to business. This model of leadership, called servant leadership, is an other-oriented leadership style that prioritizes follower needs and interests above the leader’s own and results in followers demonstrating concern for others in the organization and the larger community. 

I applied my research skills to begin exploring this idea over a decade ago. Since that time, servant leadership has grown in prominence in academic and practitioner circles as an effective means to address the challenges of modern workplaces and nurture the development and belonging of followers. 

In a recent publication in the Journal of World Business, my colleagues and I documented with a meta-analysis of 139 studies that across multiple cultures, the behavior of servant leaders was significantly associated with 23 unique attitudinal, behavioral and performance outcomes. In short, people, teams and organizations respond positively to servant leadership in almost any context. 

In further research with Baylor colleagues that was published in the Journal of Business Ethics, we explored the effectiveness of servant leadership in the particular setting of healthcare. Through surveying 1,485 nurses in 71 hospital units, we were able to determine that the virtuous character modeled by servant leaders contributes to a virtuous climate among co-workers and team supervisors. This environment was found to reduce incivility in the unit and, in turn, positively influence three measures of patient care.