The concept of servant leadership was developed by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. According to him, servant leadership was based on the philosophy that for leaders to be effective, they must have the passion to serve others. He was disturbed by the many instances where leaders wanted to lead or become leaders first so as to serve people.
His argument was that if people and organizations were to put service first, they were able to transform the world and make it a better place to live.
He argued that servant leadership was the key to the realization of a world with justice; a world where people were not driven by their self interests but the desire and passion to stand for those who are oppressed and those who are not able to articulate their feelings in a highly competitive and biased world.
Kurt Lewin outlined three broad categories of leadership namely autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire. These types of leadership are distinguished by the characteristics of the leaders and the techniques they use in their leadership.
The autocratic type of leadership is characterized by failure to share power with others. In an organizational context, autocratic leaders are the sole decision makers and they perceive the other employees simply as objects which are not capable of making any decision.
Democratic leadership is the opposite of autocratic leadership. This leadership is sometimes referred to as participative leadership because the leaders lead through bringing everybody on board in decision making with the idea that inclusiveness brings about sustainability as far as realization of organizational goals and objectives is concerned. With this style, all members of the team are involved in identifying essential goals and strategies for attaining those goals.
Servant leadership falls under the category of democratic leadership which is characterized by the inclusion of everybody in making decisions which affect their work and their organizations at large.
The laissez-faire type of leadership is actually not leadership at all because people just do as they wish. This type of leadership lacks a central authority responsible for making decisions. It is rare to find organizations with this type of leadership today.
