PurposeAims to explore the relationship between employee perceptions of servant leadership and leader trust, as well as organizational trust.Design/methodology.approachUses Laub's Organizational Leadership Assessment along with Nyhan and Marlowe's Organizational Trust Inventory.FindingsPerceptions of servant leadership correlated positively with both leader trust and organizational trust. The study also found that organizations perceived as servant‐led exhibited higher levels of both leader trust and organizational trust than organizations perceived as non‐servant‐led.Originality/valueThe findings lend support to Greenleaf's view that servant leadership is an antecedent of leader and organizational trust, and to aspects of other servant leadership models.

Executive Summary Servant Leadership received attention in the popular press, but little empirical research exists to support the theory or the anecdotal evidence used in the popular press material. The authors of this paper present a model of servant leadership based on the variables of vision, influence, credibility, trust, and service identified in the academic and popular press literature. Other researchers are encouraged to engage in the empirical research activities required to advance this stream of literature to its next phase of maturation.

Purpose -Although transformational and servant leadership has been in existence since the 1970s and theoretical assumptions about the differences began in the 1990s, this paper seeks to relate the first empirical investigation distinguishing between the two leaders, which was conducted recently by the first author. Design/methodology/approach -Through a review of the literature, the first author established 19 semantic differential scales and two self-typing paragraphs to differentiate between the two leaders. The scales and paragraphs were formed into an online survey, reviewed by an expert panel, and distributed to 56 randomly selected contacts where 514 participants responded. Findings -Through discriminant analysis, five statistically significant ( p ¼ 0.000) discriminant items were found that differentiated between transformational and servant leadership.Research limitations/implications -The paper proposes that the five statistically significant items revealed by the first author's research be brought into future definitions, discussions, and research on transformational and/or servant leadership. Practical implications -The five items proposed should also be integrated into leadership and organizational development practices, the literature, and future research. Originality/value -The paper discusses the first empirical research study investigating the distinctions between transformational and servant leaders, two leadership styles that have existed and been discussed by scholars and theorists since the 1970s.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of how servant leadership is established and transmitted among members of an organization. The second goal was to identify and evaluate the unique actions by a leader essential to establishing servant leadership. The authors' efforts resulted in identification and validation of ten leader behaviors that seem to be essential to servant leadership. Design/methodology/approach -The authors' methodology consisted of two stages. In the first stage, The authors developed an item pool of 116 items drawn from previously developed operationalizations of servant leadership. The authors then engaged a panel of 23 researchers attending a conference focused exclusively on the study of servant leadership to evaluate the. Each participant was asked to independently rate each item using a four-point scale where 1 ¼ not useful in describing servant leaders and 4 ¼ contributes greatly to describing servant leaders. The authors retained only the most highly rated items. This resulted in retention of 22 leader behaviors for further analysis. In the second stage, the authors developed a questionnaire including these items as well as items measuring transformational leadership behaviors, transactional leader behaviors, servant leadership as measured by the instrument developed by Liden et al. (2008), and a measure of leadership effectiveness developed and used by Ehrhart and Klein (2001). The questionnaire was placed in internet-based survey software and the link provided to students and faculty at a private mid-Atlantic university and to university alumni and colleagues in a variety of organizations. Each respondent was asked to describe a leader he/she had worked for in the past five years and included specification of the job role for both the respondent and the leader. Findings -The ten-item scale accounts for 75 percent of the variance with a scale reliability α ¼ 0.96. Convergent validity was determined through comparison to Liden et al. (2008) measure of servant leadership. Discriminant validity was established through confirmatory analysis of leader effectiveness, transformational leadership's four dimensions, a measure of transacti...

Page and Wong (2000) developed their servant leadership instrument but stopped short of conducting factor analysis and scale reliability tests, thus, we, in this present article, set out to extend Page and Wong's work and to see if their items would reduce to the factors that they originally intended. In this article we present a brief overview of servant leadership and we present the research procedures that we followed along with our analysis. Bennis and Nanus (1985), Block (1993), De Pree (1989, Greenleaf (1977), and Kouzes and Posner (1993) all contend that among the most important leadership requirements for leaders are those related to service and empowerment. This contention is supported by Russell and Stone (2002) who state that serving offers the potential to positively revolutionize interpersonal work relations and organizational life. This confirms the work of Farling et al. (1999) servant leadership model that was based on the variables of vision, influence, credibility, trust, and service. Page and Wong's (2000) work concurs with two factors of Farling et al.'s (1999) servant leadership model (a) vision, and (b) service.