Impact of Servant Leadership on Employee Empowerment

Abstract

In this era of globalization, there is a need for employees’ empowerment in the organization which wants to be competitive and flourish. Level of employee empowerment in an organization depends on the leadership style in the organization. The various types of leadership styles have different impact on empowerment of the employees. Servant leadership can bring about positive change in the organizations and their employees. Servant leadership is demonstrated by empowering and developing people by expressing humility, authenticity, interpersonal acceptance, and stewardship; and by providing direction (Dierendonck.2011). The study is conducted in high technology-oriented organizations in India by developing questionnaire consisting of 68 items to measure the servant leadership characteristics, empowerment and consequence variables based on ten characteristics of servant leadership identified by Spears (1998) and Empowerment instrument developed by Gupta (2009). The study highlights that Foresight, Persuading, Awareness, and Stewardship characteristics of Servant leadership are very important for Employee Empowerment. Stewardship, persuading and conceptualizing characteristics of servant leadership have positive impact on consequences viz. organizational commitment, work environment satisfaction, role satisfaction and job involvement of employees leading to higher performance of the organization providing the competitive advantage to the organization. Keywords: Leadership Style, Servant Leadership, Employee Empowerment, Competitive Advantage

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