The Diversity Intelligent Servant Leader: Developing Leaders to Meet the Needs of a Diverse Workforce

Abstract

The Problem. The ability of organizations to realize diversity remains problematic. To meet the needs of the modern workforce, new diversity and leadership approaches are required. The Solution. Diversity intelligence, a promising new human resource development (HRD) tool, leads to enhanced inclusion and equitable treatment in the workplace. Several propositions herein advance that diversity intelligence is an antecedent to the compassionate love servant leadership model. The author describes the potential value diversity intelligent servant leaders provide to society, organizations, leaders, and especially employees with protected class status. This article addresses the implications of the propositions to theory and explores the intersection of servant leadership and diversity and inclusion research streams, practice describes how organizations and HRD professionals can benefit from and implement these arguments, and social impact discusses the benefits society can accrue when all organizational members are engaged, productive and valued. The Stakeholders. This article benefits organizations, leaders, employees, and HRD professionals as well as leadership and diversity and inclusion scholars and practitioners.

Revisiting Parker & ogilvie’s African American Women Executive Leadership Model

“…Leadership Context should be revised and changed to the Socio Cultural context to more fully capture the historic and contemporary challenges which punctuate African American women's leadership experiences (Byrd, 2009;Rosser-Mims, 2010). Since the end of the last century, existing and new theories and models have been proposed and researched to address how racial and gender discrimination now manifests itself as -microaggressions, microinequities, gender bias, diversity intelligence, stereotype threat, role (in)congruity, tokenism, isolation, invisibilityto name a few (Davis et al, 2006;Eagly & Carli, 2003;Hughes, 2016;Sanchez-Hucles & Davis, 2010;Sekaquaptewa et al, 2007;Settles et al, 2018;Sims, 2018;Sue, 2010). Though the names have changed, these discriminatory practices reflect the reality that African American women must navigate an onslaught of negative experiences due to the intersection of their gender, race and social position which these women have to process and mitigate in their pursuit of the career and leadership roles to which they aspire and are well prepared to assume.…”

“…Moreover, though avoidance and confrontation accurately capture the reactions of African American women to workplace conflict, we suggest Sue's (2010) process models provides a more detailed description of how African American women may react to overt discrimination and microaggressions in the workplace. In general, current leadership theories examine the interaction of the leader and follower; and based on the experiences of African American women in the workplace, we contend that the relationship of the leader to their supervisor and work community would provide a more complete picture of how women successfully navigate, or not, their workplace environment (Avolio et al, 2009;Chin & Trimble, 2015;Sims et al, 2016;Sims, 2018).…”

“…However, despite Parker and ogilvie's (1996) embrace of behavioral complexity, no research was found on women of color employing behavioral complexity. The theories of leadership which were found beneficial to women and minorities should be explored including servant leadership and adaptive leadership (Barbuto & Gifford, 2010;Sims, 2018). Moreover, we would be remiss if we did not address the failure of mainstream leadership theory to address the needs of diverse individuals, thus new approaches are needed for leadership theory overall and African American women specifically (Hughes, 2016;Sims, 2018).…”

“…Human resource development (HRD) and other professionals, who practice in multidisciplinary ways to support learning and leadership development in the workplace, are pivotal in furthering this cultural transformation and can help ensure the success of this diverse group of individuals and support them as leaders through the examination of different intersecting identities (Carter, 2018). In this conceptual paper, we center our attention on one such group of intersectional leaders-a single class of women who share a common cultural and racial heritage, has a labor force participation and educational degree achievement that is the largest of people of color, and are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S. -African American women (Haimerl, 2015;Sims, 2018;U.S. Department of Labor, 2016).…”

Resilient Leadership: The Impact of a Servant Leader on the Resilience of their Followers

“…This would appear to support a proposed conceptual model linking servant leadership and positive organizational behavior (including resilience) and intention to quit (Dutta & Khatri, 2017). It has also been hypothesized that servant leadership, and its focus on compassion, is an antecedent to diversity intelligence which combined can improve individual well-being (Sims, 2018). The focus of servant leadership on meeting the needs of their followers, in particular the psychological needs, along with the studies linking servant leadership and increased PsyCap and humble leadership with increased follower resilience, indicate servant leadership can positively impact follower resilience.…”