Abstract: Servant leadership is the most recognizable approach to leadership in Christian organizations. Understanding that their organization endorses servant leadership, or believing Christian leaders should be servants, some Christian leaders choose to believe that they lead in this tradition, regardless of the perspective of their followers. These Christian leaders may earnestly believe themselves to be servant leaders but appear laissez-faire to their followers. In this study, the author reviews servant and laissez-faire leadership theories. He then proposes that social identity theory explains how leaders can be hijacked by social identity, which unconsciously influences them to self-identify as servants without manifesting the characteristics of true servant leadership. Groups create prototypicality gradients where the most prototypical member is given at least the sense of influence. Christian leaders, unconsciously understanding the gradient and the prototype, may unconsciously assume they are servant leaders without manifesting the behaviors. The result is frustration for followers. Christian organizations must train leaders in servant leadership, evaluate for these characteristics, and build the necessary relationships that mediate servanthood. This article concludes with practical considerations on developing good relationships that exhibit real service, as perceived by the follower.
Keywords: servant leadership, laissez-faire leaders, Christian leadership
Introduction
Over the last forty years, servant leadership has become one of the most recognizable approaches to leadership in the Western world, especially among Christian organizations (Ammons, 2016; Coggins & Bocarnea, 2015; Niewold, 2007; Wells, 2004). The vision statement of the Southern Baptist Convention is âto give ourselves to servant leadership that will assist and enable local churches in their ministryâ (Mission & Vision, 2010). The position of the president of the Evangelical Free Church âexists to glorify God through providing servant leadership for the EFCA movementâ (Office of the President, n.d.). The missionary manual of the Christian & Missionary Alliance boldly asserts, âWe are servant leadersâ (Christian & Missionary Alliance, 2016, p. v). The popularity of servant leadership in Christian organizations is beyond contestation; its true application is much harder to assess (Fung, 2017). This is especially true when the leader and follower are separated by long distances, distant time zones, and challenging environments, as is the case in many modern denominational, non-profit, or missionary organizations.
The thesis of this article is that all too often, well-intentioned and self-identified servant leaders are perceived to be hands off or laissez-faire leaders by their followers because they confuse the aspirational prototype of a servant, a function of group identity, with the difficult task of leadership in which followers feel served. Elmer (2006) pointed to this problem:
I am inclined to think that thereâs a little switch in our head somewhere. When we call ourselves a servant, the switch is triggered, and we automatically believe that everything we do from there on will epitomize servanthood. In other words, calling ourselves a servant means we are a servant. If others cannot see it, that is their problem. (Elmer, 2006, p. 17)
Similarly, Page (2009) stated that Christian organizations presumed their leaders were servants, but there was not always evidence to support this (as cited in Fung, 2017). The dynamic of high regard for servant leadership but low expression of servant leadership behaviors may occur due to social identity and self-categorization processes inherent in any group. Barentsen (2011) described a social-identity model of leadership whereby group members mentally and unconsciously create group prototypes. The most prototypical person in the group is usually invested with the appearance of influence (Hogg, 2001). In this article, I propose that servant leadership in Christian organizations can be hijacked by group identity and self-categorization processes, whereby the leader assumes he conforms to the group prototype without developing the requisite behaviors, skills, and attributes to be a true servant leader.
For this reason, well-intentioned ministry leaders who believe in some conception of servant leadership, assume the mantle of servant leadership through self-categorization and expect that everyone else will see it as well. In this paper I will explore not what Christian leaders believe servant leadership to be, but how social science has described it. This also includes a critique and a call for a critical approach to christian servant leadership. Next I will describe hands-off or laissez-faire leadership as the term has developed over the last forty years. Finally, I will explore the self-categorization process inherent in social identity theory that may cause Christian leaders to earnestly believe that they are servant leaders without demonstrating the behaviors and attributes of servant leadership. Following a summary, I will present practical considerations that leaders should keep in mind as they try to live out servant leadership ideals.
Servant Leadership Literature
Contemporary servant leadership language and philosophy emerged in the 1970s primarily through the work of Robert Greenleaf. Greenleaf worked for 40 years at AT&T and founded the Center for Applied Ethics in 1964 before beginning to write several seminal essays (1970, 1972), and finally his 1977 book (Northouse, 2012). Emerging as it did in an era of Watergate scandal, post-Vietnam angst, and reform in society and government, his book found a welcome audience. Yet the idea of servant leadership is as old as the Gospel tradition (Scuderi, 2010). Pope Gregory the Great referred to himself as servus servorem Dei, the servant of the servants of God (Willimon, 2016). In this broad sense, servant leadership is as old as the church (Scuderi, 2010). Along with the rest of society, the church readily adopted this contemporary servant leadership as a way of understanding the leadership patterns of Jesus. In fact, Greenleaf hoped that national seminaries would more readily adopt servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1998). Later, Wells (2004) and Niewold (2007) both provided robust critiques to servant leadership and warnings about over-identifying it with a Christocentric approach to leadership.
Nonetheless, Christian organizations have adopted servant leadership ideas but have done so uncritically and unsystematically. When Greenleaf first began to write, he did so prescriptively. He was advocating a particular philosophy, a set of behaviors or attributes that should be true of servant leaders (Spears, 2002). Social scientists have spent the last twenty years writing about servant leadership descriptively. Since Laubâs (1999) Servant Organizational Leadership assessment, the academy has focused on understanding the empirical basis for the effects of servant leadership. Thus, over the last twenty years, leadership scholars have come to a better understanding of what servant leadership is, and what it is not.
An Overview of Servant Leadership
Greenleafâs first essay responded to a cultural desire for a non-coercive form of leadership. He saw coercive power in blatant and overt, as well as hidden forms (Greenleaf, 1970, p. 23). Given the political skepticism of the era, university protests, racial unrest, and the Watergate conspiracy, an appeal to leadership based on persuasion and example was compelling. Greenleafâs inspiration for the idea of servant leadership came from Herman Hesseâs novel, A Journey in the East. In the novel, a group of people travels on a mythical journey sponsored by the mysterious Order. The journey goes wonderfully while Leo, the cook, cleaner, and bottle washer, serves the expedition. The group is organized, works together well, and experiences harmony. One day, however, Leo vanishes, the group immediately begins to crumble, and they soon abandon the journey. Only later is the narrator, who traveled as one of the party, invited to join the Order. As he does so, he realizes that Leo, who served the group so well, was actually the Orderâs leader (Greenleaf, 1970).
Servant leadership developed as a prescriptive philosophy or concept for its first thirty years (Laub, 1999; Spears, 2002). Greenleaf (1970) said, âThe servant-leader is a servant firstâas Leo was portrayed. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to leadâ (p. 6). It is this desire to lead that puts the follower first, before the considerations of the organization (Yukl, 2013). After more than twenty years of conceptual development, Spears (2002) articulated ten characteristics of servant leadership from Greenleafâs writings: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, perception, conceptualization, stewardship, foresight, individual development, and community building (Spears, 2002, pp. 5-8). Many saw the value in this leadership approach, and major US corporations like the Toro Company, Herman Miller, ServiceMaster, Menâs Wearhouse, and Southwest Airlines began to adopt it (Northouse, 2012, p. 233). TDIndustries, then a consistent top ten winner of Forbes 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, was also an early adopter of the servant leadership approach (Spears, 2002, p. 9). The philosophy was working in the marketplace.
Servant leadership focuses primarily on the leaderâs point-of-view, actions, behaviors, and outlooks (Northouse, 2012, p. 219). The benefits of servant leadership are well attested to in the literature. It has been linked to authenticity, empowerment, and direction (van Dierendonck & Patterson, 2015), organizational commitment (Leontaris, 2015; van Dierendonck, Stam, Boersma, de Windt, & Alkema, 2014), meaningfulness at work (Ostrem, 2006), job satisfaction and team effectiveness (Irving, 2005), and group and individual performance (Linden, Wayne, Meuser, Hu, & Liao, 2015). The literature consistently demonstrates that there is something real behind servant leadership. This collection of beliefs, behaviors, and contextually-contingent approaches does generate positive outcomes in the workplace. This, no doubt, explains its longevity in the leadership academy and marketplace. Naturally it has strengths, but also some weaknesses, especially for the Christian leader.
Strengths of the Servant Leadership Approach
The servant leadership approach has several strengths for people working in ecclesial or Christian organizations. First, it is intuitively attractive. Christians naturally see servanthood in the person of Jesus Christ, whether by His example in the Upper Room (John 13) or in His more didactic statements about leaders and followers (Matt. 20:25-27). Every believer intuitively understands that âa slave is not greater than his masterâ (John 13:16) and that, therefore, if Jesus served humbly, so should we. Likewise, the lessons of the kenosis hymn of Philippians seem to accord well with servant leadership. Jesus took the form of a servant and did not hold on to His position (Phil. 2:7). As Jesus emptied Himself of status and served, Christ-followers should imitate the master, the so-called mimetic approach.
Second, servant leadership has had a considerable impact on both the for- and non-profit world. For forty years, for-profit organizations like SouthWest airlines and ServiceMaster have benefited from servant leadership. In 2008, ServiceMaster CEO J. Patrick Spainhour said, âOne of the ways that our 35,000 associates demonstrate our servant leadership and live up to our objectives is through our commitment to the communities in which we live and workâ (ServiceMaster, 2008). If the for-profit marketplace has found that servant leadership works, how much more should it work in ecclesial and Christian non-profit settings?
Third, servant leadership has considerable empirical evidence for the validity of the theory. From the first quantitative measurement design (Laub, 1999), then through various variations (Patterson, 2003; Barbuto & Wheeler, 2006, Linden et al., 2015), servant leadership has become well established in the literature, even cross-culturally (Carroll, 2013; Dimitrova, 2008, Leontaris, 2015; Mittal & Dorfman, 2012).
Criticisms of the Servant Leadership Approach
Servant leadership also has several weaknesses. First, Greenleafâs original expression of servant leadership made the follower the focus of leadership influence processes; they are âthe number one priorityâ (Spears, 2002, p. 4). The telos, or ultimate end of servant leadership, is the well-being of the follower. Leaders in Christian organizations should think this through critically and theologically. Jesus said that the first and greatest command was âto love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourselfâ (Matt. 22:37, 39, ESV). The telos of Jesus was not to serve His disciples but to love and glorify the Father (Mark 10:45; Heb. 12:2).
Second, related to the first weakness, servant leadership can lead to a heterodox Christology (Niewold, 2007). Christ as the King of Kings (Rev. 19:16), Shepherd (John 10:11, 14), and Messiah (John 4:25-26), is sometimes overshadowed by servant leadershipâs extreme humility of the kenotic, suffering servant. H. Richard Niebuhr foresaw just such a development saying:
It would not be surprising if a new school of interpreters arose in the wake of [the] existentialists with an attempt to understand [Jesus] as the man of radical humility. But the humility of Jesus is humility before God, and can only be understood as the humility of the Son. He neither exhibited nor commended and communicated the humility of inferiority-feeling before other men. Before Pharisees, high priests, Pilate, and âthat foxâ Herod He showed a confidence that had no trace of self-abnegation. (Niebuhr, 1951, p. 26)
The third weakness is particularly germane to this article. Effective servant leadership requires the âconscious effortâ in getting to know all oneâs followers to provide support and guidance for each individual (Liden, Wayne, Zhao, & Henderson, 2008, p. 174). The pressure to conform to Christian social identity which is described below, may sometimes hijack Christian leaders. The group prototype includes a high value on service, and the Christian leader may unconsciously agree with this vision but be without the capacity to live it out with real followers. The leader assumes he is a servant leader without building servant-oriented relationships with his followers.
Summary of the Servant Leadership Approach
While Christians have recognized the connection between servanthood and leadership from the earliest days of the church, the contemporary conversation about servant leadership began with Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s and was adopted by many corporations over the following thirty years (Spears, 2002). Since then, it has moved from a philosophy to an empirically validated theoretical construct, and to a commonly recognized approach to leadership (Northouse, 2012; Yukl, 2013). Like every approach to leadership, it has its strengths and weaknesses. However, the research supporting the relationship between servant leadership and follower performance and growth, organizational performance, and societal impact is very strong. The weaknesses of servant leadership in Christian organizations rests not with the theory itself, but with its weak Christology and with the pressure it creates to conform to the group prototype of service. The weakness lies in the tendency of Christian leaders to categorize themselves as servant leaders, a function of group identity pressure, without the prerequisite behaviors. As Elmer said ironically, when Christian leaders call themselves servants, it is as though a switch is flipped in their heads: they now epitomize leadership, at least in their own minds (Elmer, 2006). In fact, the opposite of servant leadership, laissez-faire leadership, may be the unintentional result. Herein lies the danger. Believing oneself to be a servant leader does not make one a servant leader. Before exploring the self-categorization theory that drives this self-deception, I will explore the idea and organizational consequences of laissez-faire leadership.
Laissez-faire Leadership
Laissez-faire leadership is a hands-off approach to leadership characterized by passive indifference (Yukl, 2013). The laissez-faire leader abdicates responsibility, fails to implement decisions promptly, and is reluctant to either provide feedback to followers or support them in meaningful ways (Northouse, 2012, p. 196). Research in the late 1930s explored laissez-faire leadership empirically where the leader simply provided the resources necessary for a task, without directing, supporting, or stimulating subordinates regarding their task; the outcomes were poor (Bass, 1990, p. 545; Papanek, 1973). In the 1980s and 1990s, laissez-faire leadership was included on the far end of the continuum with transformational leadership (Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1990, 1994) and is sometimes referred to as ânon-leadershipâ (Northouse, 2012, p. 196). Scholars conceptualized laissez-faire leadership as part of a group of transactional leadership processes which also included management by exception (active and passive) and contingent reward (Northouse, 2012; Yukl, 2013). Closely related to laissez-faire leadership, leaders who operate by management-by-exception (passive) do not engage in problems until they are forced to do so by circumstances (Kelloway, Sivanathan, Francis, & Barling, 2004).
To followers, laissez-faire leaders fail to show up. Followers are provided with the resources necessary to do a task, but not provided with the direction, feedback, or support necessary to perform well. Skogstad, Einarsen, Torsheim, Aasland, and Hetland (2007) argued that laissez-faire leadership is not simply a lack or absence of leadership, but is destructive leadership. Laissez-faire leadership generates more conflict among followers as well as increased bullying and workplace stress (Skogstad et al., 2007).
Wong (2003) proposed a typology of leadership based on âopponent processâ of serving others and self-seeking. Interestingly, both laissez-faire and servant leadership were categorized as low self-seeking approaches, whereas servant leadership was high in serving others and laissez-faire was low in serving others (Wong, 2003, p. 7). This dynamic may serve as a conceptual bridge to partially explain why self-styled servant leaders sometimes appear to be laissez-faire leaders to their subordinates. Both the laissez-faire leader and the servant leader are less concerned with power and pride (Wong, 2003, p. 6). In the case of servant leadership, this may be due to ingroup prototypes in Christian organizations.
Laissez-faire leadership has been broadly lampooned as both ineffective (Bass, 1990) and even destructive (Skogstad et al., 2007). It is associated with workplace stress, low performance, group conflict, role ambiguity, and low job satisfaction. No leader of any stripe, let alone a Christian leader, would want these outcomes for his or her organization. And yet this can occur. Why then, do well-intentioned Christian leaders sometimes appear to be laissez-faire leaders to their subordinates? Why do leaders who have every intention of leading like Christ led, end up with followers who experience increased stress, increased conflict, and low job satisfaction? The answer may lie in with the unconscious process that governs behaviors in groups: the social identity model of leadership.
Social Identity Model of Leadership
Social identity developed in the second half of the twentieth century through the work of Henri Tajfel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor turned British social scientist (Barentsen, 2011). Most of the research into leadership focused on the individual leader. Even after Stogdillâs (1948) landmark study that pointed research away from a fixation on leader traits, leadership studies continued to be leadercentric. Skills, behavior, situations, and contingencies fueled the search for what the leader did, but it still came back to the individual leader (Northouse, 2012, Yukl, 2013). In the words of Haslam, Platow, and Reicher (2011), leadership was an âI thingâ (p. xxi). Beginning with Tajfelâs work, social identity examined the ways that both self-identity and social identity (oneâs placement of oneâs self in relation to others) work in groups (Billig & Tajfel, 1973). While self-identity is the relatively stable core of personâs self-assessment, social identity is based on a groupâs collective understanding of itself (Barentsen, 2011). Leadership in a group is a function of group-level processes whereby members both categorize themselves in relation to other group members and also create an unconscious âprototypicality gradientâ (Hogg, 2001 p. 184). Part of the process of creating an awareness of the ingroup is identifying common features that describe the group; this is called an âingroup prototypeâ (Barentsen, 2011, p. 40). Members unconsciously place themselves and other members on this graduated scale of prototypicality. Group members depersonalize this prototype but invest the most prototypical members of the group with at least the appearance of leadership and influence (Hogg, 2011, p. 189).
Christian groups, including Christian organizations, function the same way. Anyone who has been to a Christian conference intuitively understands how this works. Clothing styles demonstrate this comparative group identity as suits and ties give way to an awkward style mash-ups of people maintaining their own identities while giving the nod to changing group prototypicality. Twenty years ago, the prototype ecclesial leader dressed in a three-piece suit and power tie, perhaps with pocket square and cufflinks. Today, that prototype may be manifest by hipster glasses, a V-neck sweater, and a sports coat over blue jeans.
The key to understanding how servant leadership, laissez-faire leadership, and social identity come together is through understanding self-categorization theory. When a person sees himself in a group, he creates a self-stereotype that is a function of the shared commonalities and values of the other group members. Through this process, people no longer necessarily see themselves as unique individuals, but as unconscious representations of their group (Haslam et al., 2011, p. 52). As a result, various cognitive processes, including self-esteem and self-efficacy, influence oneâs perception of their standing in the group (Haslam et al., 2011). These processes act to lessen feelings of uncertainty and increase certainty and security by moving one to become more like the group prototype (Hogg, 2001). In this way, leaders who already represent a significant degree of group prototypicality may be pressured by these cognitive processes to assume a greater degree of prototypicality than is actually warranted. They may desire to exhibit more servanthood, holiness, wisdom, or other characteristics than are justified by impartial observation. The leader unconsciously self-categorizes himself as a servant or holy or wise and expects this will be obvious to the group. Once that self-categorization occurs, âthe switch is flippedâ and the leader believes himself to be a servant, even if his behavior is laissez-faire.
This is a challenge for Christian leaders in Christian organizations because the mental group prototype of servanthood may have little in common with the empirically derived conceptions of servant leadership identified by the social-science literature. The group prototypes of servanthood are created by images and metaphors from the Scripture like Jesus taking the towel in the Upper Room, or His statements that the first will be last, and the last, first. To use Barentsenâs (2011) three-part model, the biblical images and metaphors help the leader shape the group vision for service and servant leadership, occasionally give her the force to act as impresarios for servant activities, but may do little to engineer the development of a servant vision into the reality of the group identity. These dynamics are even more complicated if the members of the organization operate at physical distances from each other, as in the case of many non-profit or mission organizations. In these cases, the distances impede the exchange relationships, resulting in followers who are unaware of their leaderâs service. In Christian leadership circles, servant leadership is usually not informed by research that demonstrates that servant leadership means something and looks like something to the follower. Rather, servant leadership is sometimes the leaderâs aspirational projection of group prototypicality rather than something experienced by the followers.
Summary of Servant, Laissez-Faire, and Social Identity Approaches
Thus far, we have reviewed the history and empirical findings from two extremes of the leadership spectrum: servant leadership theory and laissez-faire leadership theory. The former has consistently demonstrated a quantifiable, positive impact on follower satisfaction, empowerment, and performance. The latter has similarly demonstrated a negative effect on follower outcomes. It seems strange, then, that leaders in Christian organizations who aspire to lead like Jesus, are capable of such poor leadership (Wong, 2003).
Here I propose that the social identity model provides insight into why this might occur. The quality of servanthood is conceptualized as part of the Christian group prototype, and individuals may identify with the prototype whether or not their behavior comports with servanthood in the eyes of group members. Elmer (2006) said that people are not served if they do not feel served. Therefore, the degree to which servant leadership happens is not a function of the leaderâs self-categorization and self-assessment on the group prototypicality gradient. Rather, it is a function of the degree to which the followers feel served.
This is an important distinction for Christian leaders to understand. Powerful group forces are at work in Christian organizations to conform to group prototypes that are inexorably bound up with the perfect example of Jesus Christ. The inherent mimetic message of the Scriptures is that we conform to Christâs image. Since, as Haslam et al. (2011) indicated, self-esteem is bound up in group-standing, one is prone to assess oneself more closely to the servant prototype than may be true.
Practical Considerations
Several practical considerations emerge from this study. A failure to understand these dynamics may result in followers experiencing laissez-faire, not servant, leadership. First, leadership theory has long pointed to the impact of exchange relationships as mediators for leader-follower relations (Northouse, 2012). It is the strength of the relationship between the leader and the follower that creates the feeling of being served. Followers attribute the quality of service to the leaderâs action based on their relationship. Without a relationship, there is no perception of service. While the leader may work tirelessly to serve in a thousand ways behind the scenes by preparing budgets or engaging in bureaucratic skirmishes, it is immaterial to the follower without a relationship. While there may be servant leadership from the standpoint of the leader, there is none from the standpoint of the follower. Leaders must proactively engage in relationships with their followers for the organization to experience the benefits of true servant leadership.
Second, there is a difference between service as a group prototype, service as a vision of a value to pursue, and service as actually donning the towel, washing the windows, or helping the follower take a sick child to the doctor. Leaders must be mindful that valuing service, and even an intention to serve, does not necessarily equal actual service. Service is what the follower experiences, not what the leader intends.
Third, the literature on servant leadership demonstrates numerous skills, traits, and behaviors that are true of servant leadership. It is by living out these ideas in the context of meaningful relationships that people experience the benefits of servant leadership. To value these things without implementing them is to appear as a hands-off, laissez-faire leader.
Conclusion
In this paper, I propose an explanation for why servant leaders sometimes appear to be laissez-faire leaders in Christian organizations. In Christian organizations, the group prototype of servanthood is so strong and something so obviously true of a Christ-like leader that the hard work of learning how to serve so that people feel served is often overlooked. Christian organizations must be careful to provide training on what it means to be a servant leader rather than simply endorsing the idea. Relatedly, Christian organizations should determine what they mean by servant leadership and evaluate leaders on that basis. Performance feedback, whether weekly one-on-ones or quarterly/annual appraisals, should include content relative to servanthood. Finally, Christian organizations must be mindful that service is mediated through relationship. In the same way that Christian leaders sometimes assume servanthood because it is part of the Christian group prototype, fellowship is also often assumed before it is intentionally created. Thus, the leader may assume a trusting relationship exists with a follower but that thinking, too, can be highjacked by what the group prototype says should exist rather than honestly assessing what does exist. The Christian servant leader is responsible for a creative act of building the community he or she envisions, which is a much more difficult task than giving assent to the values of its prototype.
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Jeffrey Singfiel has served as an international worker with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the Balkans for the last sixteen years and is a doctoral candidate in Regent Universityâs Ecclesial Leadership Ph.D. program. His diverse leadership experiences have included serving in US pastoral leadership roles, many years as a missionary team leader and recently, as a regional team developer.