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Servant Leadership, a leadership style introduced more than forty years ago, has recently gained popularity as corporations seek to manage the twin goals of maintaining their global competitiveness while simultaneously engaging in ethical business practices. This increased emphasis on ethics is, at least in part, a response to an ever demanding public that no longer accepts obtaining profits as the only role of business. More and more, external constituents are insisting that organizations serve the needs of all stakeholders, rather than Just the narrow set of buyers for their products and services. Since the public is demanding ethical business practices, and they primarily assess corporate ethics through perceptions of leadership and corporate culture, companies are seeking leaders who will improve the ethical culture of the organization (Kiker et al., 2015). Servant leadership "promotes more morality-centered self-reflection by leaders than other leadership styles" (Hunter et al., 2012). As a result, companies like Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, The Container Store, AFLAC, and 7-Eleven have all explicitly adopted core tenets of servant leadership either into their mission statements or in their fundamental business practices. Further, it is estimated that as many as half of the very top companies on Fortune Magazine's "Best Places to Work" annual list regularly practice servant leadership (Lichtenwainer, 2011).
Consistent with (and perhaps in response to) practitioner calls for more ethical leadership approaches, the study of servant leadership has exploded over the past five years. At the core of this research is a shared understanding that servant leaders are motivated to lead and have a need to serve. However, fundamental issues such as defining and measuring the construct have not been standardized. In a qualitative literature review, van Dierendonck (2011) presents a conceptual model of servant leadership as he also distinguishes servant leadership from other approaches to leadership. He notes the lack of consistency in the research. As the research proliferates, this inconsistency challenges those who are studying servant leadership to make meaningful progress. This inconsistency is reinforced by a recent meta-analysis examining transformational, servant, authentic, and ethical leadership, which compared the four leadership approaches and showed that servant leadership explains variance above and beyond that accounted for by these other leadership styles (Hoch et al., 2018). Hoch and colleagues (2018) also call for additional...