Servant Leadership
Chapter from the book:
Durmuş,
G.
(ed.)
2024.
Research on Leadership Dynamics II.
Synopsis
Since the beginning of humanity, managing processes and people has always been a necessity. The reason for this necessity is to organize events, situations and the future and to ensure that healthy decisions can be made. While leadership, which is sometimes done consciously and sometimes unconsciously, opens many doors, it is only recently that this process has become a subject of research in the field of science. Some leadership behaviors that classical leadership approaches no longer find answers to have led scientists to seek different answers. In this context, it is possible to see many leadership approaches under the umbrella of “Modern Leadership Theories”. Especially in the rapidly changing and developing world, changes and developments in leadership perceptions are also noticeable. While new leadership approaches such as “Transformational Leadership”, “Democratic Leadership”, “Visionary Leadership”, “Authentic Leadership” have emerged scientifically in the modern period in the twentieth century, when a human-oriented transformation was experienced, one of the leadership approaches that has found a place in the literature has been “Servant Leadership”. Servant Leadership, which was first discussed in 1970 by Greenleaf in his article titled “Servant as Leader”, has been a subject of intense research, especially in the early 1990s. The article in question focused particularly on leader characteristics. However, Greenleaf (1972) published another article titled “The Institution as Servant” and this time he touched upon the servant leadership processes of not only individuals in leadership positions but also organizations. In this context, Servant Leadership has become a part of a multi-sided process rather than a one-sided one. Servant leaders can be defined as not only serving but also providing the common ‘good’ for their followers and contributing to the development of employees (Page and Wong, 2000). In this case, the leader should be selfless when necessary, meet the needs of their followers and be able to raise leaders like themselves (Matteson and Irving, 2006).