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Servant Leadership Characteristics

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Servant Leadership Characteristics
Fundamentally, servant leadership entails leaders being servants first. It starts off with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, and goes beyond one’s self interest, where leaders are genuinely concerned about serving their followers. Further, it also involves leaders not using their power to get things done but instead try to persuade and convince their followers. In this way, followers support their leaders and are motivated to become the very best they can become (Dierendonck, 2011). Indeed, servant leaders do care about the development of their employees and even share power. Servant leadership, according to Dierendonck (2011), has several characteristics: active listening, empathy and stewardship, commitment to the …show more content…
Some of the differences are: the purpose of servant leadership is to ensure that the priority of the leader is to serve others including the employee and to make sure that their needs are served before theirs (Dierendonck, 2011). Transformational leadership on the other hand focuses on developing the organization’s capacity to innovate even though it balances this with consideration for followers through its four major principles including individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence (Johnson, 2013). Specially, it is focused on enhancing a firm’s capacity to prioritize and support development of appropriate and necessary changes to business processes and practices. Servant leaders also focus more on the needs of the individual than the organization while transformational leaders focus on benefits to firms by enhancing employee effort and output. Servant leaders are also more likely to give greater freedom to subordinates than transformational leaders (Dierendonck, 2011). Transformational leadership drives towards leaders inspiring staff to work with more energy, commitment and purpose in order to achieve a vision. Servant leaders on the other hand give more autonomy to employees to make choices in order to inspire them to be more willing to work hard for the leader (Williams & Jones,

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