Servant Leadership:  

Who Serves Whom?
Addressing Servant Leadership in the 21st Century

Abstract

Modern organizational pressures have driven leadership scholarship to generate post-industrial theories to fit existing organizational imperatives. Among these theories, servant leadership experienced a resurgence practitioner and academic interest in 2004 and peaking in 2016 (Eva et al., 2019)  as many types of organizations sought solutions to solve the problem of how to effectively retain employees under shifting workforce composition and values. This poster extension addresses the epistemological underpinnings of servant leadership by analyzing its development under dominant pressures within social, political, and economic contexts, while comparing these conditions to the modern landscape. It highlights the influence of rigid business needs on an evolving application of servant leadership engineered into the profit-driven behavioral management model used today. The gap between servant leadership’s core altruistic values and the evolved model currently applied in organizations suggests a growing chasm that poses a risk to the theory’s future value. Implications for this preliminary groundwork lay the foundation for servant leadership training and development to address the unmet needs of the current workforce and improve employee satisfaction, retention, and intent to be promoted within a variety of organizations.