Cultures of Servant Leadership and Their Impact

Abstract

Servant Leadership has primarily been studied at the level of individual leaders and their impact, yet Greenleaf, who first formally proposed the idea in 1970, also considered the construct as an important institutional element. Further, because it is values-based, and culture is the organizational mechanism for developing and transmitting shared values, an organizational lens for studying servant leadership is also needed. The current study of three firms examines organizational differences in servant leadership. We found organizational differences in levels of servant leadership, suggesting a cultural explanation. We also found that individual (i.e., supervisor) and organizational (i.e., cultural) servant leadership have different effects on employee outcomes, suggesting a unique asset attributable to a culture of servant leadership. Finally, we found that employees high in core self-evaluation are more likely to identify leaders with a servant leadership orientation, suggesting that such individuals can facilitate cultural transmission of servant leadership in an organization. Implications to theory and practice are discussed.