CHARACTERISTICS OF SERVANT LEADERS

Phuoc D. Nguyen

Beaver (2008) listed constructs of exemplary followership from servant leadership scholars, including self-management, critical thinking and learning, agapao love, commitment, and service. There are many characteristics of servant leaders studied by scholars, but research on servant followers’ characteristics and followership which are very limited, especially research on the characteristics of an employee that would thrive while working with a servant leader.

The follower’s Agapao love increases both the commitment to the leader and the follower’s self-efficacy. The higher levels of commitment and self-efficacy result in a higher level of intrinsic motivation that leads to a higher level of altruism toward the leader and the leader’s desire to see the organization do well. This leads to higher levels of service to the leader. (Winston 2003). Winston (2003) proposed the extended Patterson’s (2003) model is a process-based loop model of servant leaders’ behaviors and followers’ attributes. However, he did not demonstrate to establish a matrix of compatibility between each follower’s attributes for each servant leader’s behavior.

There is very little research to verify the characteristics of serving people that are consistent with the characteristics of service leaders. Russell and Stone (2002) implemented a review of servant leadership attributes to develop a practical model, including Servant Leadership Model 1 and Servant Leadership Model 2, therein the Servant Leadership Model 2 describes the impact of servant leadership attributes, organizational culture, and organizational performance to employee attitudes and behaviors and vice versa. However, Russell and Stone (2002) have not demonstrated and listed servant followers’ characteristics that fit servant leadership attributes yet.