Servant and Transformational Leadership: Styles and Influences

Introduction to Effective Leadership Styles

Two leadership styles that are widely regarded as effective are servant leadership and transformational leadership. Both emphasize helping followers become better overall, and both build on the positive traits of trust and integrity. Together, these approaches can complement each other to create sustained success in the workplace.

Servant Leadership: Compassion and Follower-Centered Focus

Servant leadership focuses on putting the needs of others ahead of one's own. It is fundamentally about serving one's followers and thereby building an organization grounded in compassion, empathy, and the genuine desire and ability to help people overcome the obstacles they face—whether those obstacles involve a particular work habit, a personal problem, or a financial difficulty. Servant leaders look out for their followers attentively and with care.

Transformational Leadership: Emotional and Social Intelligence

Transformational leaders focus on using Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Social Intelligence (SI) to build relationships and develop their followers into the kind of workers an organization needs to succeed. This means the leader sets obtainable goals and both challenges and assists workers in attaining them. The leader provides the tools needed to grow and develop along the way, utilizing methods such as communication, face-to-face interaction, review, training, and active participation to help advance the organization through diligence and hard work.

The transformational leader will not only transform the workers but also the workplace environment itself, shaping a setting where workers genuinely want to be and are happy to contribute. In a sense, both servant and transformational leadership strategies can work in tandem to create meaningful success in the workplace.

Internal Influences on Organizational Behavior

The internal influences that affect organizational behavior include employee morale, a system of ethics (whether or not one is in place), management likeability (Sanders, 2006), two-way communication between bosses and workers, integrity within the hierarchy, transparency among leadership, and trust and honesty—or the lack thereof. All of these elements impact organizational behavior and workplace culture because they deal with the human element most vital to any organization: the workers themselves.

When Enron's managers and employees began adopting an unethical organizational mission, for instance, the entire corporation was brought to its knees. This antisocial, unethical, and financially delinquent behavior spread like a contagion, infecting the morals and motivation of those working throughout the organization. Poor leadership is also a contributing factor and will ultimately bear responsibility for allowing such a contagion to take hold (Eichenwald, 2005).