Practicing Servant Leadership by Dirk van Dierendonck & Kathleen Patterson

Author:Dirk van Dierendonck & Kathleen Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Future Is for Compassionate Servant Leaders and Compassionate Servant Followers

Van Dierendonck (2011) discusses many individual antecedents to becoming a servant leader. Among those are the need to serve and the motivation to lead and thus to become a servant leader; being self-determined, in other words, satisfaction of basic psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence; strong human value basis; and the levels of moral cognitive development and cognitive complexity and humane orientation. We suggest that one important antecedent for being a compassionate servant leader would be self-compassion , including self-kindness, shared humanity, and mindfulness (Neff 2003). Self -compassion is a bridge to others’ experiences, but it also protects servant leaders from becoming too demanding of themselves, forgetting their own needs and thereby self-sacrificing to the point of burning themselves out.

As part of the Dialogue project between large Finnish companies and students (Piha et al. 2012), students at a Finnish business school were asked what they expect and hope of their future managers. The most often mentioned characteristics of a good manager were: helps others to succeed; clarifies goals and assignments; does not micromanage; provides sufficient support and freedom and space for being different; is easy to approach, to talk to about one’s issues and to ask for help; gives not only feedback but also “feed forward”, in other words, forward-looking feedback that enhances future performance; has courage to deal with issues as they arise; is genuine and does not hide behind one’s role and status. Generation Y students’ characterizations of their expectations of and hopes regarding their future managers were a perfect match with the tenets of servant leadership—these all fit perfectly well with what characterizes servant leaders. The younger generations have grown to equal relationships, and authoritarian ways of leading is not what they are ready for.

When Robert Greenleaf developed his ideas on servant leadership, he definitely was way ahead of his time. Servant leadership is about giving and doing good things for others and encouraging similar behaviours in others, too. By boosting compassionate and engaging servant leadership in research and in practice, it is possible to build organizational cultures of generosity, benevolence, compassion , and engagement.

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