Servant Leadership Research

Abstract

A comprehensive listing of leadership research includes more than 8,000 lead- ership studies ranging from the great man theory in the early 1900s to contingency theory in the 1970s, and excellence theory in 1980s (Bass 1990). Yet the multidis- ciplinary nature of leadership contributed to the failure of leadership research to produce a systematic, coherent, and integrated understanding of leadership (Bass 1990). So much for the hype in leadership research that leadership researchers like Barnard (1948, p. 80) lamented in frustration over six decades ago and concluded that “leadership is the subject of an extraordinary amount of dogmatically stated nonsense.” It is therefore importance to examine more closely the theoretical underpinning of and empirical support for servant leadership. ©