While extremely passive in practice, servant leadership may be more successful to maintain over the long-term, primarily because it leads through example and inspiration.
Many industrial psychologists associate servant leadership with higher degrees of genuine satisfaction among workers, because (where it is successful) it represents a Naturally evolved enterprise loyalty based on proven results. Naturally, therefore, servant leadership may work best where (1) the servant leader demonstrates, by his own success, operational techniques and procedures that are repeatable by others, and (2) personal achievement is connected to some tangible reward or benefit to the individual.
For the same reason, servant leadership is better suited to industries and enterprises characterized by low turnover and high long-term retention. Unlike transformational and charismatic leadership styles, servant leadership is a very low- intensity experience that does not correspond to high burnout rates. In this regard,
Successfully implemented servant leadership mirrors elements of small communal societies, in that individuals contribute to the community for the good of everyone, which, in turn, also benefits the individual, indirectly (Spears, 2002).
Conclusion:
Generally, leadership styles are more rarely one-dimensional than they are multidimensional systems that incorporate various elements of other philosophies of business leadership or management. In practice, all forms of leadership are likely to feature some component of transactional reward or benefit associated with performance, whether performance is readily capable of objective measurement or merely a function of demonstrated group loyalty or personal allegiance to the enterprise vision or message.
Both transformational and charismatic leadership emphasize aspects of interpersonal charisma, but to varying degrees and with a different specific...
Conversely, charisma is a beneficial trait for all leaders with the possible exception of servant leadership. As between transformational and charismatic leadership, interpersonal relations, group unity through identity, ritual ceremonies, and symbolism play very similar roles, differing mainly in the specific object. Ultimately, transactional motivation characterizes the relationship of the most common relationship between the individual and the community in modern society, only because most work must fulfill specific functions or meet certain output goals rather than specifically because transformational and charismatic leadership both lend themselves to pathological loyalty to corrupt ideology and personalities.
References
Bass, B. (1985) Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations. Free Press:
New York.
Bass, M. (1997) Does the Transactional/Transformational Leadership Transcend Organizational and Motivational Boundaries. American Psychologist, 52.
Bass, B., Steidlmeier, P. (1999) Ethics, Character, and Authentic Transformational Leadership Behavior. Leadership Quarterly, 10.
Maitland, a., Johanson, D. (1989) Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution.
Musser, S. (1987) the Determination of Positive and Negative Charismatic Leadership. Grantham: PA
Spears, L. (2002) Tracing the Past, Present, and Future of Servant Leadership. Focus on Leadership: Servant-leadership for the Twenty-first Century. Wiley: New York
