Essay: Pros And Cons Of Servant Leadership In Organizational Behavior - 70 Chars

Write an essay to discuss the pros and cons of the argument provided below before concluding and providing a recommendation. The assessment intends to test students’ ability to comprehend the materials sourced from lectures, texts and research. It also intends to improve students’ writing, analysis, and argumentation skills and add to their understanding of the applicability of organisational behaviour in the workplace.

The argument for Servant Leadership

The essay is intending to provide an understanding of the applicability of organisational behaviour in the workplace through critical reading and writing, analysis as well as argumentation skills. The essay argument is ‘a servant leadership management style is the best approach for managing people in organisations’. Hence, a discussion about the pros and cons of this argument will be a major part of this essay. Servant leadership is that leadership style in which managers consider themselves as the supporters and cheerleaders. The managers utilize their power and leadership skills in order to support their co-workers, as their major goal is to serve others before their own agenda (Rouse, 2018). Besides, servant leaders are capable to evolve the culture of a firm over time. In this way, we will research over servant leadership in a way that it’s both sides can be uncovered and analysis can be done which will provide an effective understanding about the desired organizational behaviour at the workplace (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011).

Being a great a leadership philosophy, servant leadership is based on the belief that efficient leaders often strive to serve others, than ensuing power or taking control over others. Here others can comprise partners, customers, fellow employees as well as the community. Facts as per the research demonstrating that the servant leader is servant prior the leader as we know that it always starts with the obvious feeling that everyone wants to serve the community and others (Rouse, 2018). Afterwards, conscious selection brings someone to wish to lead. Moreover, a servant leader is apparently different from the one who is leader first with distinct qualities so that he can serve the organization in a better way.

If we will try to find the difference in between other leadership styles and servant leadership then according to (Hales, 2018) Greenleaf's approach servant leadership emphasises on captivating responsibility for the desires and needs of others for supporting ethical leadership that ultimately impulses leaders for showing respect for the dignity and values of their assistants (Rouse, 2018). Additionally, a servant leader is distinct to other leaders in following ways:

• Listening skills: a servant leader strive for identifying the willpower of the group as well as assists in clarifying that will of his sub-ordinates.
• Healing skills: servant leaders understand well, the part of their leadership responsibility is helping in growing whole employees hence their sense of self is impaired.
• Empathy: servant leaders always anticipate the positive intentions of their co-workers and they do not discard them as people (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011).

Likewise, there are many more quality attributes such as awareness, conceptualization, persuasion, foresight, commitment for the development of people, stewardship and community building attitude of a servant leader distinguishes him from other leaders. Hence, these above ten principles of the servant leadership are the foundations of this management style those are pre-requisite for managing and leading people in organisations effectively. Therefore, evaluating these above positive skills of the servant leadership style, it can easily be defined that servant leadership is the best approach to manage the human force in an organisation (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011). However, while looking into diverse organisational structures, many issues or challenges of the servant leadership has been found which will be discussed in the below parts of the discussion. On the other hand, there are countless benefits of servant leadership like employees who have been treated with respect will be more loyal to the firm, and they provide an improved service to the organization's customers as well as come frontward with their innovations and new ideas (Zheng et al., 2010).

The ten principles of Servant Leadership

Moreover, research on the superiority of servant leadership over others depicts that someone who contemplates himself to be a servant of the peoples who follow him, is carries the properties of a servant leader. It means that a servant leader totally belongs as well as works for his sub-ordinates that makes him sincere, selfless and a true leader. Moreover, servant leadership exist in all scenarios like in a government office, business organization or anyone else who is having a position of power. Hence, a servant leader has many primary skills and characteristics as mentioned above which differentiate him from rest leaders, as stated by Greenleaf (McDermott, 2017). A servant leadership management style is a way of behaving being a manager and it has been embraced since a long time from the leaders in organisations. A servant leader focuses on organization’s goals rather than put emphasis on their personal goals. The servant leadership management style from natural instigated feelings rather than operational characteristics of a leader in an organisation. The strategy behind this leadership is that by fulfilling changed interests and needs of its employees, an organisation is capable to establish their objectives and targets through their whole potential (Savage-Austin & Honeycutt, 2011).  

Analysis of the critical research on servant leadership has been resulted in useful pros and cons of a servant leadership management style (McDermott, 2017). Thus, analysis is demonstrating that pros of servant leadership are more than cons of the same. However, this leadership style is not perfect either, as it is run by the human beings only and in a system driven by humans, mistakes are inevitable.

Being a unique and advantageous management style, servant leadership is used in organisations for getting advantages like it develops dedication and confidence among employees as well as forms more engaged and responsible teams, family-like environment. Servant leadership advances work-life balance as well as profits and earnings in an organization. According to (Colquitt et al., 2011), by applying servant leadership at the workplace a leader can potentially plan for serving their sub-ordinates at first that is the major benefit of this management style to the organisations. Besides, the above will later provide satisfaction to the employees of the organisation, and which will further lead to enhanced productivity as well as performance. Moreover, it is also analysed through the research accompanied from the surveys on the employees functioning in a medium sized restaurants chain, and the benefits of servant leadership style has been characterised. As per the analysis, in that restaurant a servant leader directed their sub-ordinates’ efforts towards attending peoples and customers first, rather than focusing on accomplishing their self-goals (Management Study Guide, 2017). In this way, that serving culture of their organisation openly impacted their restaurants’ overall performance as well as the professional attitude of their employees in the organisation (Livesey & Kate, 2008). Furthermore, the above are the pros of the servant leadership which ultimately led to improved job-satisfaction, enhanced employee-job enactment and minimized rates of absence as well as the turnover of the organisation was boosted considerably.  

Pros of Servant Leadership

Contrary, the servant leadership management style is having few of the negative sides over the managing function of employees that is affecting the overall performance of business organisations negatively (Hales, 2018). As we know that servant leadership is all about the nature and behaviour of the leaders, hence it is a challenge to find such organizational managers as well as leaders who are willing to act selflessly (Jones, 2013). Additionally, other cons of the servant leadership in an organisation include the dearth of willingness by leaders for adopting the servant leadership style into their practices, timescale, lack of power, vagueness in the objectives and goals. Moreover, there are many more cons of implying servant leadership for managing people in an organisation. One of them is stated that the servant leader being a higher authority might affect the employees’ thinking as well as performance negatively (Goetsch & Davis, 2014). Besides, the leaders in an organisation usually carry high power and authority for communicating as well as dealing with the people of the organisation; therefore they may get indulged into enjoying high levels of independence that further hinders the competitive advantages of the organisations over others. According to (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009) it is been specified that the employee satisfaction aspect plays an intermediating role amid the main relationship of employee loyalty and servant leadership. Moreover, an experiential study conducted in China also revealed that use of well-structured equation model in the organisations decides the effectiveness of the servant leadership style there (Cooren et al., 2011). It means that servant leadership is correlated positively with the employees’ loyalty as well as satisfaction, thus its effects are also affected through these factors considerably, which creates dependencies and conflicts (Burke et al., 2015).

In conclusion, it has been analysed through the research conducted here that servant leadership style is a way of leading human force which needs leaders to emphasize other peoples and employees first in any organisation. Besides, servant leadership is the management style which focuses on progressive development of the supporters by building autonomy, trust and healthy relations with organisational fellows. Likewise, management of people in any organisation is typically assisted through involvement of employees as well as strategic decision-making in the working of the organisations. Therefore, almost all pros and cons of the servant leadership management style have been discussed efficiently, that led to the summary of making modifications as well as implementing effective strategies aiming to improve performance of the organisations.

References

Burke, R.J. et al., 2015. Organizational Empowerment Practices, Psychological Empowerment and Work Outcomes Among Frontline Service Employees in Five-Star Turkish Hotels. Effective Executive, 18(1), p.42.

Colquitt, J., Lepine, J.A., Wessaon, M.J. & Gellatly, I.R., 2011. Organizational behavior: Improving performance and commitment in the workplace. London: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

Cooren, F., Kuhn, T., Cornelissen, J.P. & Clark, T., 2011. Communication, organizing and organization: An overview and introduction to the special issue. Organization Studies, 32(9), pp.1149-70.

Goetsch, D.L. & Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. New Jersey: Pearson.

Hales, J., 2018. THE PROS AND CONS OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP. [Online] Available at: https://blog.zingtrain.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-servant-leadership [Accessed 10 December 2018].

Jones, G.R., 2013. Organizational theory, design, and change. London: Pearson.

Livesey, S.M. & Kate, K., 2008. "Transparent and caring corporations? A study of sustainability reports by The Body Shop and Royal Dutch/Shell." Organization & environment, 15(3), pp.233-58.

Management Study Guide, 2017. Popular Theories of Organizational Communication. [Online] Available at: https://www.managementstudyguide.com/theories-of-organizational-communication.htm [Accessed 04 December 2018].

McDermott, , 2017. The Top 7 Management Styles: Which Ones Are Most Effective? [Online] Available at: https://www.workzone.com/blog/management-styles/ [Accessed 10 December 2018].

Putnam, L.L. & Nicotera, A.M., 2009. Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication. London: Routledge.

Rouse, , 2018. servant leadership. [Online] Available at: https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/Servant-Leadership [Accessed 10 December 2018].

Savage-Austin, A.R. & Honeycutt, A., 2011. Servant leadership: A phenomenological study of practices, experiences, organizational effectiveness, and barriers. Journal of Business & Economics Research, 9(1), pp.49-54.

Zheng, W., Yang, B. & Mclean, G.N., 2010. Linking organizational culture, structure, strategy, and organizational effectiveness: Mediating role of knowledge management. Journal of Business research, 63(7), pp.763-71.