**Executive Summary
This briefing is intended to increase the knowledge and understanding of
department chairs and their supervisors of a current leadership
philosophy and practice known as servant leadership. It examines servant
leadership in the context of the department and the chair's functions.
In 1970, Robert Greenleaf first described servant leadership. He viewed
servant leadership as a deep desire to serve--a prerequisite to
leadership-- and identified 10 characteristics of servant leaders.
Barbuto and Wheeler (2006) added an additional one: calling.
Subsequently, in a new model, Barbuto and Wheeler reduced these 11
characteristics to 5 and redefined them as the following factors:
altruistic calling, emotional healing, persuasive mapping, wisdom, and
organizational stewardship. They also developed an empirical survey
instrument for measuring these factors, the Servant Leadership
Questionnaire (SLQ).
In this briefing, I suggest that servant leadership is an appropriate
practice for chairs because many of its outcomes (e.g., positive work
environment, empowerment, and service) are those that chairs desire.
Research thus far suggests that servant leadership also results in
greater commitment, satisfaction, effort, and trust. I provide numerous
examples of these outcomes in this briefing.
This briefing also addresses a number of broad questions and issues
about servant leadership: Is servant leadership too idealistic and
"soft" to be effective? Are decisions determined by the leader's ego
needs? Can servant leadership be used to address all leadership and
management functions? Can one be a servant leader in a nonservant
organization? How does a servant leader deal with the paradoxes of
chairing a department? Can the chair meet followers' highest-priority
needs? Can't individual needs conflict with organizational needs? Are
the means as important as the ends? Why should chairs take the Servant
Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ) as a development experience?
**
