Servant Leadership's Limitations at Work

Two Responses

Is there a counter argument to the article below?

Although servant leadership is shown to support interpersonal relationship development as well as workplace spirituality (Houghton et al., 2016; Reddy, 2019), servant leadership is limited, too, in terms of its impact on the bottom line and a company’s ability to measure or even define in it (Eva et al., 2021). Moreover, servant leadership style requires a certain set of traits and characteristics from leaders, and an organization may find it difficult to obtain a leader with such a set. However, as Eva et al. (2021) point out, structural configurations and formalization within the organization can potentially replace the need for leadership, period.

Thus, the counter-argument to the notion that servant leadership can promote and support workplace spirituality and interpersonal relationships is that leadership may not even be necessary at all if the organization can simply configure itself appropriately with formal processes and structures in place that support the aims and objectives of the organization and allow it to meet its bottom line. This, of course, supposes that a scientific management approach ala Frederick Taylor can be implemented in place of a leadership approach, in essence.

There are, however, limitations to the scientific management approach as it curtails any semblance of human creativity or free-thinking, which can weigh on an individual’s sense of job satisfaction and potentially his performance; whereas servant leadership proposes to increase both in order to help the organization achieve its aims and objectives. In the end, there is no satisfactory way to measure or evaluate for either method other than by way of qualitative investigation.

References

Eva, N., Sendjaya, S., Prajogo, D., & Madison, K. (2021). Does organizational structure

render leadership unnecessary? Configurations of formalization and centralization as a substitute and neutralizer of servant leadership. Journal of Business Research, 129, 43-56.

Houghton, J. D., Neck, C. P., & Krishnakumar, S. (2016). The what, why, and how of

spirituality in the workplace revisited: A 14-year update and extension. Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 13(3), 177-205. https://doi.org/1080/14766086.2016.1185292

Reddy, A. V. (2019). Servant Leadership and Spirituality at Workplace: A Critical

Review. International Journal on Leadership, 7(1), 8–12. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/servant-leadership-spirituality-at-workplace/docview/2191032439/se-2?accountid=6363

Is there more that can be added to the article below to support the authors point of view?

Something more that could be added to the article would be a more historical or even philosophical understanding of what is meant by spirituality so that a fuller appreciation of how it applies to leadership and the workplace could be achieved. For instance, Komives et al. (2020) identify concepts associated with leadership and spirituality, such as authenticity and values—but these are really simply another way of explaining the virtues acquired by an individual who is focused on developing his best self possible by aligning himself with the transcendental ideals of an ancient system of virtue ethics proposed long ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (Simpson, 1992). But Komives et al. (2020) also emphasize the idea that spirituality is subjective because it has to do with one’s own values and beliefs. This becomes a problem, at some point, when people have differing values and beliefs that clash in the workplace. Something more needs to be said about this, and an appropriate contextualization for the setting of parameters would be an application of the virtue ethics system (Simpson, 1992). After all, it is this system that enables one to formulate a consistent and coherent ethical system of values and virtues that can be used to facilitate the development of the individual character and/or the workplace community.

Likewise, as Walumbwa et al. (2008) note, authentic leadership is about self-awareness, so it is important to have a philosophical framework that supports the cultivation of self-awareness, with a set of traditional transcendental values that everyone can objectively agree upon as good in and of themselves. The virtue ethics system provides just that, and it can be recommended for any workplace. This information would help to improve the article by giving it an additional objective sense and character for greater insight onto the matter of how to formulate values.