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What Are The Strengths And Weaknesses Of Servant Leadership

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Servant leadership is a type of leadership whereby the leader serves the needs of the people, empathizes with them, and involves them in solving their needs. Servant leadership is all about involving the people you are leading in your decision making, being ethical and caring for the people to enhance their personal growth at the same time improve their life. A servant leader does not simply delegate roles; he starts the work and energizes the others to join him and get the work done. According to Spears (2004), the servant leader as defined by Greenleaf is one who gets the natural feeling of wanting to serve first and then a conscious choice brings him/her to lead. This leader makes sure that other people’s highest-priority needs are take …show more content…

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
The servant leader empathizes with people s/he is leading, and get to understand them. This makes problem solving easy. Sometimes, people who have been exposed to bureaucracy may perceive you as a weak leader who does not know how to make decisions.
Servant leaders are constructive, persistent, and motivating. They are also leaders who see complex, big pictures. (St. Thomas University Online, 2015). This makes them very engaging and full of energy which is a good trait as mentioned by Jack Welch in his 4 Es. It is most often seen as a long-term strategy that depends on building trust and loyalty in order to get the most from workers (St. Thomas University Online, 2015). This may be very time consuming and the leader may not be able to accomplish his/her goals especially if it is a president whose term is …show more content…

Unlike servant leadership, a Machiavellian leader does not care about the emotional dissonance of the citizens or employees in the case of a company. Most of these leaders are power hungry politicians who will do all it takes to acquire positions in the parliament and amass wealth. However, there are other leaders who may just want to rule harshly for “the greater good”. Either way, as studied by Gkorezis et al. (2015) , “Machiavellian leadership has a both direct and indirect, through organizational cynicism, on employees’ emotional exhaustion.” An example of such a leader is Gambia’s former president, Yahya Jammeh who had to be impeached for resisting to hand over power. He is allegedly reported to have been worth more than the entire country he was ruling for many years and claimed that he got his wealth from Allah (Freedom Newspaper, 2017). This is a leader who does not put the interest of the people at heart and exploits them to amass wealth. A servant leader would never do such a

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