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ABSTRACT
Servant leadership is an emerging concept in the gamut of leadership theories. It is a leadership approach that aims to satisfy the needs of the employees so that it enhances job satisfaction and inspires them to reach higher levels of performance in organizations due to its emphasis on serving, vision, values, teamwork and empowerment. The aim of this paper is to understand the theory of Servant Leadership and the characteristics exhibited by servant leaders. The study compared the perceptions of servant leadership of employees at different positions in the organizations. The study also goes on to investigate whether servant leadership correlates with desirable leadership outcomes such as job satisfaction by conducting a literature review, conducting a survey, analysis of data and offering recommendations to leaders, managers and also organizations wishing to understand Servant Leadership.
Keywords: Leadership, Servant Leadership, Job Satisfaction, Change,Organizational change, Empowerment, Transformational Leadership.
INTRODUCTION
The twenty-first century has seen an emergence of flatter organizations with decentralized structures and with more collaborative work environments. This becomes a catalyst for synthesis of disparate ideas and will be a key element to success. For creating such work environments; inspired, creative and trustworthy leadership is necessary to improve human effectiveness (Burns, 2003). Servant leadership offers a fresh perspective to leadership theories which proposes to create work environment which would be creative, inspiring and trustworthy. There is plethora of research available on leadership and many people study leadership. But very few people are able to walk the talk to serve others before leading, which is the very crux of servant leadership. Servant leadership is all about putting one's ego, needs, desires and status aside to initiate a change process that will transform the organization into a highly performing and collaborative community of talented individuals who are willing to serve others and the organization in turn.
Servant leadership are two words which are not often seen together as most people probably would consider the words servant and leader to have opposite meaning. For a layman, a leader is powerful; a servant is not. A leader gives orders to be followed by others; a servant takes orders from others and follows them. How these two words are interlinked and brings out a different style of leadership which...