Service and Humility in Leadership: Intriguing Theories, but Do They Actually Produce Results?

• In Event: Assessing New Organizational Leadership Approaches to Tackle Today’s Complex Challenges

Short Description

Based on research exploring performance results of leaders and leadership styles, this presentation will focus on the relationship between the subordinate’s perception of the performance results of their boss and the boss’s level 5 and servant leadership behaviors.

Detailed Abstract

Servant leadership has been an intriguing concept for leadership scholars. Some wonder if the term is an oxymoron, and a clear definition of Servant Leadership has been elusive since Greenleaf introduced the term in 1970. There are currently over a dozen validated instruments to measure Servant Leadership. With the abundance of discussion regarding the definition, there is a dearth of research into whether or not it is more successful in generating performance results for the leader. There are high profile examples of successful corporations that have embraced servant leadership, such as Chick-Fil-A and Southwest Airlines, but no indication of corporations that have embraced it and failed.
Collins (2001) introduced the concept of level 5 leadership in his seminal best-selling book Good to Great. In his research, Collins found that all of the companies that rose from good to great were led by humble CEOs who had "an absolute, obsessed, burning, compulsive ambition for the organization". He identified this paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will as Level 5 leadership. Although the concept has proven popular, there has been criticism of the research methodology because of a lack of disconfirming research. The fact that the 11 companies that made the leap from good to great all had Level 5 CEOs doesn’t mean that many of the good or failed companies did not also have Level 5 CEOs. There has been no follow-up research to prove that level 5 leaders generate better results.
A common perception among business leaders is that Level 5 leadership serves as just another name for servant leadership. In academia, several scholars have suggested that level 5 leadership may represent the same concept as servant leadership. (Patterson et al, 2003; Drury, 2004; Morris et al, 2005; Wong and Davey 2007; van Dierendonck, 2011). As Collins’ research team searched for a term to describe this new type of leadership seen in the good-to-great companies, some discussions arose regarding calling it servant leadership. However, the researchers saw the level 5 leaders as more than servant leaders.
In the current study, 290 participants evaluated their bosses to determine the use of Level 5 and Servant Leadership. In addition, the MLQ instrument was used to measure transformational, transactional, and passive leadership to determine the amount of incremental performance that was attributable to Level 5 and Servant Leadership. Performance was measured by the subordinate’s perception of boss’s performance results compared to peers.
The results of the study show that level 5, transformational, and servant leadership all have positive relationships with performance results. Those three leadership styles were also highly correlated with each other, and they were different from transactional and passive leadership. Bosses in nonprofit organizations, including education, were much more likely to be rated as level 5, transformational, or servant leadership.

Participant

• Wilbur Reid, Johnson University