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Servant Leadership Theory Essay

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Servant Leadership Theory Essay
CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL REVIEW
Servant leadership Style
The practice and academic circles agree that servant leadership is really an important subject in the field of organizational behavior. Servant leadership is one with the most dynamic effects during individual and organizational interaction. In other words, whether a management is able to execute “collaborated effort” depends on servant leadership capability. The excellent leader not only inspires subordinate’s potential to enhance efficiency and also meets their requirements in the process of achieving organizational goals. Stodgily (1957) defined servant leadership as the individual behavior to guide a group to achieve the common target. In latter days, Richards & Engle (1986) defined
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Behavioral theory from late 1940s to late 1960s--- It believes that a leader will be able to achieve ideal organizational efficiency if he demonstrates effective servant leadership behaviors. These servant leadership behaviors may be trained or learned through experience. Actual behavior or servant leadership styles are emphasized. Representative research is conducted in Ohio State University. Ohio State University proposed “consideration“ and “initiating structure” of servant leadership behaviors. Consideration is a behavior that focuses on strengthening relationship with subordinates based on their needs and perceptions, while “initiating structure” is a behavior that focuses on subordinate performance in goal …show more content…
Contemporary servant leadership theory since 1970s---The viewpoint of contemporary servant leadership theory states that servant leadership is a type of interactive process with the environment. Bass & Avolio (1990) proposed transactional servant leadership and transformation servant leadership :( 1) transactional servant leadership---encouraging subordinates through incentive establishment. In other words, incentive elicits work performance. Transactional servant leadership is the basis for most servant leadership theories. It focuses on the exchange relationship between the leader and the subordinate (Fry, 2003;Northouse, 2001); (2) transformation servant leadership---to enhance staff’s trust and respect for leader by altering intrinsic work value and faith of staff at the same time in order to elicit work capabilities. Because “charisma” is viewed as an essential element, transformation leader provides incentives for subordinates, enhance subordinate potential and development. (Fry, 2003); and (3) Charismatic servant leadership theory refers to the follower’s perception toward certain behaviors of the leader as being heroic or

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