Developing Holistic Leaders in the Toxic Context Using the Servant Leadership Approach

• In Event: Innovative Applications of Inclusive Leadership Theory

Short Description

This paper outlines a leadership development program that, using the servant leadership approach, aims to develop holistic leaders and help them stay ethical rather than turning toxic. The modules developed have different effects on undergraduate, graduate, and executive cohorts.

Detailed Abstract

Cases of toxic leaders in organizations are ubiquitous. Endless corporate scandals and ethical failures involving bullying, abuse of power, toxic emotions and others are occurring at a global scale (Aasland, Skogstad, Notelaers, Nielsen, & Einarsen, 2010; Illies & Reiter-Palmon, 2008). Various recommendations to deal with destructive leaders are typically focused on selection and efforts to control, minimize, or eliminate destructive leaders in the organizations as early as possible. In other words, they are either preventive or curative in nature. The preventive approach aims to recognize toxic leaders long before they are even recruited. As such, organizations develop policies designed to weed out potential recruits with some predisposition to exhibit these behaviors through a battery of psychological tests, pervasive monitoring scheme throughout their career, etc. Equally prevalent in organizations is the curative approach which involves treatments typically taken after the destructive leadership behaviors being repeatedly exhibited and/or the destructive leaders being singled out. The main goal of this approach is elimination of problem by which destructive leaders are seen as people with curable diseases. The preference towards cure over prevention is implied through the provision of executive coaching for the allegedly destructive leaders.

We argue in this paper that neither the preventative nor curative approaches are sufficient to deal with destructive leaders because both approaches rest on the reactive stance towards a problem, existing or potential. Instead, we offer a leadership developmental approach which assumes a positive and systematic stance towards individual leaders. Proverbially speaking, rather than sorting out the bad apples from the organizational basket, the attention is turned into growing healthy trees that produce good apples. The developmental approach does not concern so much with eliminating risk factors for destructive leaders as it is with the development of holistically healthy leaders encompassing the physical, psychological, spiritual, ethical, and emotional elements of health (Quick, Macik-Frey, & Cooper, 2007). Quick et al. (2007) suggested that attributes of wellness that set healthy leaders from toxic ones are purposeful life, quality connection to others, and positive self-regard and mastery. However, these attributes do not seem to be featured in the overwhelming majority of leadership development programs. In their review of management development programs for executives, Kets de Vries and Korotov (2007) argue that many do not have lasting effects because they are oriented towards helping executive doing the same things differently instead of doing different things. For these programs to be deeply influential, they need to be designed to have a lasting emotional impact addressing the inner theater of the participants, and not just pure intellectual knowledge transfer. While leadership training has a positive correlation to effective leadership behavior (Caligiuri, 2006; Collins & Holton, 2004; Day & Harrison, 2007), often the measures to quantify the leadership effectiveness are predominantly financial.

We subsequently sought to better understand the landscape of the leadership development literature by reviewing leadership development practices over the past two decades published in peer-reviewed journals from 1994 to 2016. Thematic analyses of these practices revealed that critical areas such as morality and spirituality, regardless of how they are defined, are often neglected in various forms of leadership development. Notwithstanding the significant interests and investments in leadership development, most leadership development programs seem to focus on traditional dimensions of leadership at the expense of other equally important dimensions. We argue on the basis of these findings and extant literature that this lack of holistic leadership development has contributed to the proliferation of various form of abusive and destructive leadership in organizations. Many concur that these problems will continue to persist and grow in the absence of an intentional, systemic effort to invest in the development of authentic and moral leadership (Luthans, 2003; Quatro, Waldman, & Galvin, 2007).

Taking these views into account, we develop a leadership development curriculum that aims to bridge this glaring gap and ensures it addresses the emotional, moral, and spiritual elements of the leader apart from the conventional intellectual and competency-based elements. To that end, we employ the servant leadership framework. Servant leadership is a holistic approach to leadership that engages both leaders and followers through its service orientation, authenticity focus, relational emphasis, moral courage, spiritual motivation, and transforming influence such that they are both transformed into what they are capable of becoming. Our review of the leadership development literature shows that many leadership development programs are linked to popular approaches to leadership such as transformational leadership. We posit that servant leadership with its focus on the distribution of power to the followers rather than the accumulation of power within the leaders has been found to extend other value-based leadership theories such as authentic or ethical leadership. As such, it is a more suitable alternative to the current emphasis on transformational leadership. More specifically, the modules were built around the six dimensions of the servant leadership construct developed by Sendjaya, Sarros, and Santora (2008), covering the intellectual, relational, emotional, ethical, and spiritual aspects of leader-follower interactions.

The leadership development modules we developed were delivered in three different settings: third-year undergraduate leadership course, graduate leadership course, off-campus executive education course. While the overall course content is drawn from the philosophy and construct of servant leadership, the modules were customized to suit their level of work experience. The major distinctive among these three groups is their full-time work experience and by extension their exposure to other forms of formal and informal leadership development programs. The undergraduate students typically have zero full-time work experience, the graduate students two to five years, and the managers range from five to twenty. Both the undergraduate and graduate courses were developed as a 12-week teaching modules. Nearly 1,000 students were enrolled in both programs within the past four years. The executive program was delivered over three months in six half-day modules involving 60 front-, mid-, and senior-level executives of a large transportation company. Through feedback obtained from participants in each course setting, we identify similarities and differences of their respective responses to the program. Major observations about holistic leadership development were delineated.

Participants

• Sen Sendjaya, Monash University

• Mulyadi Robin, The University of Melbourne

• Nathan Eva, Monash Business School