Patterson & Winston’s (2003) servant leadership model and Liden’s servant leadership model attempt to present servant leadership through various constructs. The current paper compares and contrasts the two models.
Both models present servant leadership as a multidimensional construct even though each focuses on different constructs. Some constructs presented by both models are similar. For example, Liden’s model presents seven servant leader constructs, which are creating value for the community, empowering, behaving ethically, assisting followers to grow and succeed, putting followers first, emotional healing and conceptualizing (Liden, Wayne, Zhao & Henderson, 2008). Patterson & Winston’s model, nevertheless, focuses on constructs of service, empowerment, trust, vision, altruism, humility, and love (Patterson, 2003). Patterson and Winston’s model views servant leadership to be a virtuous theory in which virtue is an intrinsic element of a leader’s characters and can be spiritual (Patterson, 2003, Winston, 2003). Liden’s model reinforces this view through its behaving ethically construct in which the leader should do the right thing and care about others. The spiritual element is absent in Liden’s model.
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Both models emphasize the importance of empowering subordinates. Patterson & Winston’s model, for example, state that the servant leaders should focus mainly on developing the follower as opposed to focusing on the objectives of the organization. Empowering workers leads to a greater impact that goes beyond the organization. Concerning empowerment, servant leadership is about using authority and power to develop a better society. The empowering process, based on Liden’s model, allows the servant leader to develop the leadership capacity of the followers.
The emphasis of the two models on the need to focus on the betterment of the followers contributes to my understanding of servant leadership. Most people consider leaders to be the people in charge, those with authority, those who can make decisions, tell others what to do, and decide the strategy to be followed. Based on these two models, however, leadership is about performing a service for the followers by avoiding self-interest. Servant leadership can be defined as a leadership model in which the leader’s main purpose is caring about the well-being and welfare of the followers through addressing follower concerns and providing followers with their needs.
References
Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly , 19 (2), 161–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.01.006
Patterson, K. A. (2003). Servant Leadership: A Theoretical Model [PhD Thesis].
Winston, B. E. (2003). Extending the servant leadership model: Coming full circle. Servant Leadership Roundtable .
