All successful businesses adopt a leadership method, or style, in their overall operations and functions. Servant leadership is a relatively new researched leadership style; compared to transformational, transactional, and situational leadership styles. The servant leadership style operates when the servant leader acts as the servant first toward employees and then makes a conscious choice for them to lead. The servant-leader is sharply different from a person who is a leader first with the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. The servant leadership style proposes when leaders behave in a manner that is consistent with a drive to adopt and enact a leadership role to maximize stakeholder as opposed to self-interest, employees experience increased growth and well-being. As a result, employee commitment and contributions to organizational and societal goal attainment surpass self-seeking or transactional orientations toward their work.
The servant leadership style contends when leaders’ attitudes and actions manifest a desire to serve the interests of all stakeholders (as opposed to primarily serving self-interests), employees experience increased well-being and growth, and they adopt a serving-others orientation like that of their leader. There are several key behaviors of servant leaders, for which they developed a psychometrically sound multi-dimensional measure and they are: (a) putting followers first—manifesting through actions and words that satisfying the needs of followers is a top priority; (b) creating value for the community—showing a genuine concern for helping the community surrounding the organization; (c) emotional healing—attending to the emotional needs of organizational members (particularly immediate followers); (d) empowering—providing organizational members (particularly followers) with control to identify and solve organizational problems; (e) helping followers grow and succeed—showing genuine concern for followers’ career growth and development by providing support and mentoring; (f) behaving ethically—interacting openly, fairly, and honestly with organizational members; and (g) conceptual skills possessing adequate knowledge of the organization and tasks at hand so as to be able to effectively support the growth and well-being of organizational members. The functional attributes of servant leadership as vision, honesty, integrity, trust, service, modeling, pioneering, appreciation of others, and empowerment. The accompanying attributes of servant leadership are communication, credibility, competence, stewardship, visibility, influence, persuasion, listening, encouragement, teaching, and delegation. Listening, empathy, healing, awareness persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growing people, and building a community are the 10 core attributes of servant leadership. Servant leadership emphasizes leadership behaviors that have an employee-development focus on the deglorification of the leader. The servant-leader potentially can revolutionize organizational culture through positive transformation. Servant leadership is a blueprint of ethical leadership contained within that can configure an organizational climate that shares moral accountability with value creation; therefore, producing goods or services desired by consumers in our socially conscious society.