Analysis of servant-leadership characteristics: Case study of a for-profit career school president

Abstract

Servant leadership is a challenging leadership philosophy to study empirically. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to determine if an effective leader of a for-profit career school displays the 10 servant-leader characteristics, identified by Larry R. Spears (1995) in Reflections on Leadership , according to respondents, employees of the president. The results indicated the president did not display all of the servant-leader characteristics. The research subject's leadership style, according to the results, is an amalgam of various leadership styles including situational and transactional.