by Ronald Claiborne

Created on: November 27, 2009   Last Updated: November 28, 2009

Combining servant leadership, total quality management, and emotional intelligence can be the impetus that sparks an upturn in effectiveness in the 21st century organization. Any company looking to obtain competitive advantage must learn how to meet the needs of the knowledge workers in the information age. This feat can best be accomplished by combining servant leadership, total quality management, and emotional intelligence principles as normal leadership practices in business.

Servant leadership is a late 20th century development that was first recognized in leadership literature by Burns (1978) and Greenleaf (1977). Greenleaf (1997) believes servant leaders put other people's needs, aspirations, and interests above their own (Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002). The servant leader strives to transform their followers through implementing the ten characteristics of listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community into the organizational culture (Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002). According to Sendjaya and Sarros (2002) servant leadership has been used successfully by organizations to obtain competitive advantage but recognize that business literature contains sparse incidents where empirical research has been conducted to quantitatively and qualitatively to establish servant leadership as a validated leadership theory.

Sendjaya and Sarros (2002) believe servant leadership is such a new concept that several questions need answering and empirical testing need to be conducted to establish servant leadership as a valuable leadership theory. According to Sendjaya and Sarros (2002) some of the questions include asking what are the differences between servant leaders and those who choose not to be, What does it take for a would-be servant leader to embrace the nature and play the role of servant leader, and Does the practice of servant leadership produce results that differ from other models/paradigms of leadership? Answering these and some other questions in a rigorous quantitative and qualitative research should provide the empirical evidence necessary to validate servant leadership as a viable leadership theory.

Combining servant leadership with total quality management and emotional intelligence can enhance the acceptance of servant leadership as new leadership theory. Although servant leadership seems to be emerging as a new business concept other concepts must not

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