Servant Leadership Essay

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Servant Leadership Abstract Businesses and organizations around the world are seeking for an ethical leadership style that accomplishes a shared vision. This paper seeks to establish a link between servant leadership and ethical behavior. It aims to support a theory that servant leaders may be more ethical minded in their actions than other styles of leadership. This paper looks at articles and works of other researchers to draw a hypothesis. The Research was conducted from the course text book, on-line references and ProQuest data base. Introduction It’s difficult to listen to the news or read a paper that does not have a major news story in it raising questions about organizational leadership and ethics violations. Scandals seem abundant today in business, sports, government, nonprofits and other organizations. Organizational leaders and stakeholders continue to look for effective business strategy and continue to formulate new models for ethical leadership that respond to and work in today’s demanding and competitive global society. Current scholarly research in this field has begun to link servant leadership behaviors and values with improved performance and ethical leadership. Servant Leadership The term “servant leadership” was first identified and named by Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990) a retired AT&T worker. However, the concept of servant leadership is not new (Spears, 1996). Greenleaf is considered the founder of the servant leadership movement and model. He believed that the power-centered authoritarian style of leadership that was well known and prominent in American business in the 1950’s-1960’s, was no longer effective and was not working well. He proposed a different leadership philosophy; where a leader facilitates achievement of vision and productivity through personal development and the empowerment of their followers (Washington,

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