In the shadow of corporate scandals such as Enron and Worldcom, an increase in attention has been directed towards an approach termed 'servant leadership'. To date, servant leadership has been discussed and described almost entirely in the North American context (Farling et al., 1999;Spears, 1995). In the following study, we explored the extent to which followers from Ghana and the USA have experienced three servant leadership dimensions in a work situation, and the extent to which these followers relate servant leadership dimensions to judgments about leadership effectiveness in each culture. After testing for measurement equivalence and adjusting the item weights in each culture, we found that Ghanaians reported experiencing servant leadership behaviours significantly less than North Americans. We also found that vision had a significantly stronger relationship with leader effectiveness for Ghanaians in comparison to North Americans, but that both sub-samples relate service and humility with leader effectiveness similarly. We explored possible explanations and implications based on cultural differences.
This chapter presents items comprising three scales that measure servant leadership using three key dimensions: service, humility, and vision. The instrument was used to measure servant leadership behaviors experienced by followers in the United States and Ghana. Reliability and validity evidence is included from two research studies. A discussion of the relationship of servant leadership behaviors with employee outcomes assessed in these studies concludes the chapter.
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