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This article presents an integrated construct of servant leadership derived from a review of the literature. Subscale items were developed to measure 11 potential dimensions of servant leadership: calling, listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, growth, and community building. Data from 80 leaders and 388 raters were used to test the internal consistency, confirm factor structure, and assess convergent, divergent, and predictive validity. Results produced five servant leadership factors-altruistic calling, emotional healing, persuasive mapping, wisdom, and organizational stewardship-with significant relations to transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, extra effort, satisfaction, and organizational effectiveness. Strong factor structures and good performance in all validity criteria indicate that the instrument offers value for future research.
Keywords: servant leadership; scale development; construct clarification
Since Greenleaf's (1970) thought-provoking essay, several scholars and practitioners have embraced the concept of servant leadership. Although this concept is elusive, there appears a practical credibility that has spawned increased attention to servant leadership. This demand stems entirely from the intuitive appeal of the philosophies surrounding servant leadership because no empirical operationalization exists. Servant leaders are described as categorically wise, and their decision processes and service orientations appear to be vehicles for invoking organizational wisdom, described as the meshing of applied knowledge and informed experience to make both optimal and altruistic choices (Bierly, Kessler, & Christensen, 2000). A service-oriented philosophy of and approach to leadership is a manifestation of and an antecedent to enabling a wise organization. Servant leaders have been described as capable of managing the various paradoxes of decisions, which may foster the development of organizational wisdom (Srivastva & Cooperrider, 1998). Although specific links between servant leadership and wisdom have been both vague and conjectural, their philosophical compatibilities are noteworthy. To advance this dialogue, a more precise clarification of the servant leadership construct is necessary.
Most academic research efforts have focused on conceptually similar constructs such as altruism (Grier & Burk, 1992; Kanungo & Conger, 1993; Krebs & Miller, 1985). self-sacrifice (Choi & Mai-Dalton. 1998), charismatic (Conger & Kanungo. 1987: Weber. 1947), transforming (Burns, 1978), authentic (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999; Price. 2003), spiritual (Fry, 2003), and, to a lesser extent, transformational (Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1994) and leader-member exchange (LMX; see Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). In recent years, greater attention has been...