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Competing in the global marketplace requires organizations to promote their leaders as servant-leaders by replacing the old rules of traditional leadership with the top of the leadership pyramid. By focusing on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong, servantleadership appears as a promising model to solve problems and promote personal development.
Robert K. Greenleaf first introduced the term servantleadership in his book The Servant as Leader (1970). As noted by the Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership (1970), servant-leaders start with the desire to serve first, and then they become inpired to lead. Accordingly, Greenleaf described servant-leadership as a practical philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first and lead second.
Parris and Peachey (2013) explained that there is a significant distinction between someone who wants to be a leader first and someone who cares to serve first. The latter is a person more interested in making sure that people's needs are being served. The difference between those two types of people is that a servant-leader makes sure that people who are served are growing and becoming healthier, wiser, and most importantly more independent.
Laub (1999) defined servant-leadership as placing "the good of those led over the self-interest of the leader" (p. 81). Laub's definition is based on six dimensions that are still used until this day to assess the health of servant-leadership. These dimensions characterize a servant- leader as someone who values people, develops people, builds community, displays authenticity, provides leadership, and shares leadership (Parris & Peachey, 2013).
In education, according to Nichols (2011), a teacher as a servant-leader is someone who is not just an expert or a classroom manager, but is also a leader within their own classrooms, schools, and communities. Based on the existing literature and the framework based on servant- leadership this study investigated students' perceptions of their professors as servant-leaders. The novelty of this study lies in its empirical evidence that servant-leadership behaviors among professors in a private higher educational institution was a recognizable form of leadership, as viewed through students' eyes.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Studying the impact of servant-leadership on performance is difficult, as servant-leaders are rarely seen. The revolutionary approach of the servant-leadership model as introduced by Patterson (2003), is to motivate, inspire,...