Servant Leadership Versus Transformational Leadership

Subject: Leadership Styles
Pages: 2
Words: 587
Reading time:
3 min

Many companies try to achieve the maximum level of effectiveness. Choosing the right form of leadership is one of the ways to reach this goal. Therefore, leadership has become a widely discussed topic in business people, politicians, and even scholars. Through rational organizing of work, a leader can create a strong team, built a reliable democratic political system eliminating the possibility of a total power of one leader and provide a comfortable work environment. Therefore, it is necessary for the director of a firm to choose the adequate form of leading. The goal is to find the best solution for a company: servant leadership and transformational one.

Servant leading is a young concept that implies serving other employees. The higher the workers’ position is, the more significant number of employees they have to serve. On the contrary, transformational leadership is an older model in which heads of a company are the primary examples to be followed. They set the tone for work, give motivation for their servants; the productivity of the organization depends on their work. Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, but nowadays, servant leading is a better option for the implementation of activities in all types of organizations.

Job satisfaction is one of the primary features of servant leadership, unlike the transformational one. According to research, servant leading associates with satisfaction with work more other types (Hoch et al., 2016). It is emphasized that thanks to employees’ feeling of engagement in work activity, associating themselves as a leader and a part of the working process. That is why the staff of a company is more satisfied with working conditions, and this fact helps them to carry out their tasks better.

Another advantage of servant leadership is a high commitment of employees to the work process. Workers do not see their leader as the face of their organization and the main problem-fixer. Servant leading refuses from following such a paternalistic approach and changes the rules of a game, giving others to participate in the activity of a company as much as they can and desire (Andersen, 2018). It allows employees not just to help the company to thrive, but to be an equal part of the whole process. Undoubtedly, employees’ commitment increases the efficiency of any organization.

However, transformational leadership is claimed to be more productive as it is a stable system that creates enthusiasm for the working staff of a firm. Nonetheless, it should be mentioned that servant leadership proved to give the same level of desire to work as a transformational one (Castro & Gasman, 2019).

The only difference is that a transformational leader gives an example of proper devotion to work, whereas a servant head of an organization provides higher dedication by considering the other employees’ interests, feeling empathy, and attracting everybody in the body process. Servant leading, in this case, seems to be a better option for any organization because, when considering the transformational leadership system, it is easy to see that if a leader is not dedicated and enthusiastic enough, the whole company suffers. Servant leadership does not allow such a thing to happen, and this makes it a more stable and effective type of organizing the work process.

All in all, servant leadership is proved to be a more beneficial, useful, and advantageous method of organizing work in a company, whether it is a business firm, an educational institution, or a political party. When a leader serves his company and shares his powers, it helps to increase effectiveness dramatically.

References

Andersen, J. A. (2018). Servant leadership and transformational leadership: from comparisons to farewells. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 39(6), 762–774. Web.

Castro, A., & Gasman, M. (2019). A primer on minority-serving institutions. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hoch, J. E., Bommer, W. H., Dulebohn, J. H., & Wu, D. (2016). Do Ethical, Authentic, and Servant Leadership Explain Variance Above and Beyond Transformational Leadership? A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), 501–529. Web.