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Introduction
In the field of organizational behavior and management there has been a recent growing interest in leadership theories, including significant inquiry into servant leadership by numerous scholars. They have researched its impact on individual and organizational outcomes in the context of work engagement and have investigated employee well-being in the workplace ([48] Van Dierendonck and Nuijten, 2010).
While many studies have examined the servant leadership model, as it is perceived in the Western context, there is still growing but limited research with regard to Eastern contexts. The cultural environment in Turkey, as an example, is affected by political, ethnic, and religious considerations. While the vast majority, 98 percent, of Turks is Muslim, unlike many other Muslim-dominated cultures, "Turkey has officially been a secular state since the early 1920s with the adoption of the Parliamentary Democratic Government System" ([4] Aycan, 2004, p. 455). In an age of globalization and emerging leadership styles, as a secular republic striving to implement democratic principles, Turkey has become a role model for the Muslim world. Since by some estimates more than 23 percent of the world's population is Muslim, there is a need for the Western world to understand the concept of servant leadership within the Eastern perspective and vice versa. [19] Duke (1998) argued that leadership supports the concept that leadership cannot be fully understood unless it is studied within the immediate context in which it exists. It is the aim of this quantitative study to find out if there is a similarity between servant leadership and paternalistic leadership understanding/perception in the minds of Turkish employees at the organizational setting. Furthermore, comparing and contrasting servant leadership with paternalistic leadership is meant to enrich the literature on paternalistic leadership and to test the universality of servant leadership in Eastern cultures. Consequently, the study addressed the following two research questions. First, how do Turkish White collar employees perceive their managers' style when it is compared with the servant leadership model? Second, do employee perceptions of the servant leadership model correlate with paternalistic leadership?
The remaining question, then, is why Turks might perceive paternalistic leadership as a form of servant-leadership. Western people, by comparison, have a perception of servant-leadership that almost certainly precludes paternalism. That viewpoint may be due to imagery...