Organizational change initiatives in the United States frequently fail with estimated failure rates as high as 90%. Change failure rates resulting from underused and poorly trained front-line managers (FLMs) remained high, with no signs of improvement in the past 2 decades. The purpose of the correlational study, grounded in servant leadership theory, was to examine the relationship between employee perceptions of their FLM's servant leadership dimensions and employee affective commitment to change. A purposive, nonprobability sample of 107 employees of a U.S. manufacturing organization that had recently undergone organizational change completed a questionnaire for the study. Results of the multiple linear regression analysis were not significant, F(7, 107) = .714, p = .660, R2 = 0.045. Though results were not statistically significant, the beta weights for creating value for the community (β = .165) and behaving ethically (β = .168) indicated that creating value for the community and behaving ethically were potentially the most important variables in accounting for variance in the model. The beta weights for emotional healing (β = -.048) and conceptual skills (β = -.047) indicated that emotional healing and conceptual skills were potentially the least important variables in accounting for variance in the model. The findings may be of value to manufacturing leaders developing initiatives to improve change initiative success rates. Support for servant leadership during periods of organizational change has positive social change implications for employees. The practice of servant leadership reduces employee uncertainty and anxiety incurred during periods of change by resolving uncertainties and sustaining employee motivation for supporting organizational change.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore conditions under which the human spirit flowers in modern organisations. The topic of the thesis was sparked by prolonged study at the Master’s level of the writings of Robert K. Greenleaf, modern servant leadership theorist. Greenleaf was concerned with the ways and the conditions in which the human spirit flowers. He wrote a number of essays on the topic (Greenleaf, 1996b). He often questioned what organisations as they currently stood were doing to help people grow as whole people. As workers spend increasing amounts of time in the workplace, organisations continue to seek ways in which to increase employee satisfaction and decrease the compartmentalising of human experience. The geographical context of study is that of Aotearoa/New Zealand with participants selected from the Church Educational System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland region. The Church Educational System, or CES, is a worldwide religious education provider headquartered in the Western United States. The context for study was chosen based on my perceived personal growth as a student for nine years in the CES programmes and my desire to understand how the programme was administered in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The project employs a qualitative methodology using as primary data gathering methods in-depth interviews with three CES directors, three focus groups made up of sixteen volunteer teachers, classroom observations, and document analysis. Using Greenleaf’s descriptions of the servant leader as a central focus, I attempt through this qualitative study to address the central research question: How does the Church Educational System (CES) nurture servant leaders? The central metaphor of the garden was used in processing and analysing data. The garden metaphor was intended to assist in the conceptualisation of relationships of service as they are at work in the lives of participants. Identified relationships of service from the findings were between participants co-workers (plants), love (life-force), Jesus Christ (sun), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (plot), purpose (strength), Aotearoa/New Zealand (soil), exemplars (canopy), experience (seasons), Church Educational System (gardener), positions, training, programmes (gardener tools), growth (colour/aroma/fruit), knowledge (water), and organisational care (pruning/transplanting). Findings indicated that nurturing in the Church Educational System is influenced by the ability of the organisation to bring people together in meaningful ways. Findings also show that understanding relationships of service that make up whole people may be an important step for organisations in the nurturing of servant leaders. Nurturing in the CES appears to be taking place in three primary areas: balancing, renewal, and regeneration. The findings of this study have significance for those inside and outside of the CES. A chapter is dedicated to exploring possible application of findings in variant organisational contexts. Providing consistent formal and informal opportunities for sharing in spirit and intellect at the organisational level appears to be a key in the nurturing of servant leaders in organisations.

Servant leadership focuses on stakeholder concern and follower development and empowerment. It has begun to emerge as a useful perspective of leadership within academic research, but theoretical development remains limited, and some of its key propositions have not been tested. In this dissertation I build and test a theory of how servant leadership works, why it works, and when it works. Drawing on the extant servant leadership literature, a social learning perspective, and research on gender roles and schemas, I propose a conceptual definition and theory of how servant leadership impacts two characteristics of followers (prosocial motivation and psychological capital) to affect distal outcomes including voice and performance. I also test servant leadership's impact on the spread of servant leadership behaviors to followers, a key proposition of servant leadership for nearly fifty years which has never been empirically tested. Further, I propose gender and gender schemas as potential moderators of servant leadership, arguing that the more communal emphasis of this approach may interact with sex role factors to impact its effectiveness, such that females may actually have an advantage in using servant leadership, as opposed to the implicit masculine advantage in other leadership behaviors. To answer these research questions, I conducted a temporally lagged multi-organizational study testing the mediators, moderators, and outcomes of servant leadership. Using a variance decomposition approach to clustered and cross-level interactions in an HLM framework, I find substantial support for my theoretical predictions. Results support the idea that exposure to servant leadership behaviors is associated with all three performance outcomes, including an employee's own enactment of servant leadership, both directly and through the mediating effects of positive psychological capital. These effects were contingent as hypothesized, such that servant leadership was more powerful when used by a female manager, and when experienced by individuals with high female gender schemas. Theoretical and practical implications of these conclusions, as well as future research suggested by these results, are discussed.

This is a story of a social movement's conception and the articulation of its meaning and meaningfulness. Gawad Kalinga, an ambitious Philippine community development cum nation building movement, initiated "GK777" to build 700,000 homes in 7,000 communities, in seven years. I assessed the national and global implications of this social movement's social networking model of nation-building through community development, poverty alleviation, and slum eradication. Using an ethnographic case study to conduct an inductive, grounded theory analysis, the study sought to explore if strategies and actions that go beyond traditional and conflict-centered social movement conceptions are enabling it to achieve their goals and to transfer its model to five other countries. The global implications and replicability of GK's nation-building model on the emergence and development of other forms of social movements, civil society-state governance, are compelling. The attempt at articulating and integrating political process and opportunity structure, resource/ structure mobilization, framing process, and new social movement theories in explaining another form of social movement and of civil society highlights the suitability for such kind of research, long-term monitoring and evaluation, and theorizing.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore conditions under which the human spirit flowers in modern organisations. The topic of the thesis was sparked by prolonged study at the Master’s level of the writings of Robert K. Greenleaf, modern servant leadership theorist. Greenleaf was concerned with the ways and the conditions in which the human spirit flowers. He wrote a number of essays on the topic (Greenleaf, 1996b). He often questioned what organisations as they currently stood were doing to help people grow as whole people. As workers spend increasing amounts of time in the workplace, organisations continue to seek ways in which to increase employee satisfaction and decrease the compartmentalising of human experience. The geographical context of study is that of Aotearoa/New Zealand with participants selected from the Church Educational System of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Tāmaki-makau-rau/Auckland region. The Church Educational System, or CES, is a worldwide religious education provider headquartered in the Western United States. The context for study was chosen based on my perceived personal growth as a student for nine years in the CES programmes and my desire to understand how the programme was administered in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The project employs a qualitative methodology using as primary data gathering methods in-depth interviews with three CES directors, three focus groups made up of sixteen volunteer teachers, classroom observations, and document analysis. Using Greenleaf’s descriptions of the servant leader as a central focus, I attempt through this qualitative study to address the central research question: How does the Church Educational System (CES) nurture servant leaders? The central metaphor of the garden was used in processing and analysing data. The garden metaphor was intended to assist in the conceptualisation of relationships of service as they are at work in the lives of participants. Identified relationships of service from the findings were between participants co-workers (plants), love (life-force), Jesus Christ (sun), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (plot), purpose (strength), Aotearoa/New Zealand (soil), exemplars (canopy), experience (seasons), Church Educational System (gardener), positions, training, programmes (gardener tools), growth (colour/aroma/fruit), knowledge (water), and organisational care (pruning/transplanting). Findings indicated that nurturing in the Church Educational System is influenced by the ability of the organisation to bring people together in meaningful ways. Findings also show that understanding relationships of service that make up whole people may be an important step for organisations in the nurturing of servant leaders. Nurturing in the CES appears to be taking place in three primary areas: balancing, renewal, and regeneration. The findings of this study have significance for those inside and outside of the CES. A chapter is dedicated to exploring possible application of findings in variant organisational contexts. Providing consistent formal and informal opportunities for sharing in spirit and intellect at the organisational level appears to be a key in the nurturing of servant leaders in organisations.

Thesis (D. Min.)--McCormick Theological Seminary, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-40).

The purpose of this paper is to describe the current communication techniques and strategies used by political parties resulting in these parties achieving significant growth, understand the components of those communication techniques in order to isolate the factors attributing to this achieved success and develop a model that can be replicated from a business organization in order to achieve similar beneficial results.The study revealed that there is a clear connection between political parties and business organizations, broadening the research fields of both entities respectively. Furthermore, the findings were categorized based on potential value, with practices such as “thriving on dissatisfaction”, “taking advantage of emotions”, “showing visible structures as an organization / political party”, “intentional use of weak signals”, “leader’s direct connection to audience” and “formulating receiver interpretation of signals” appearing to have high potential in achieving success if implemented correctly in the communication strategy.

Contact Centre agents operate in closely monitored and highly controlled environments and their work consists of solving service requests or assisting customers with information on products or services. Consequently their work involves a great deal of emotional labour and stress. It is not surprising then, that the working environment of the Contact Centre is reported to have a negative impact on the levels of Quality of Worklife of Contact Centre agents, and that in the Contact Centre context, it is likely that low levels of Quality of Worklife exist. It is argued that it is important for organisations to be particularly aware of the Quality of Worklife perceptions of their employees should they want to address Quality of Worklife levels and benefit from the positive consequences of higher levels of the construct. Numerous variables are reported to play either an antecedent, moderating, mediating, or consequential role in relation to the Quality of Worklife construct. A systems model of Quality of Worklife is developed, which illustrates the inter-relationships of these variables and how they affect and are affected by the Quality of Worklife construct. It is argued that leadership is an important antecedent to Quality of Worklife, and this is the antecedent of interest in this study. It is proposed that it is not just any leadership that will contribute to an improved Quality of Worklife, particularly within a challenging context such as the Contact Centre environment. Rather, it is suggested that certain qualities of leaders will have a greater influence on Quality of Worklife. For example, leaders who focus on relationships and are caring - characteristics associated with servant leaders - are deemed more suitable for the Contact Centre context. The research also proposes that there are close associations between Servant Leadership and Trust, which in turn has the potential to affect Quality of Worklife positively. It is argued, therefore, that Trust mediates the relationship between Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife in the customer service frontline context. While there is a broad base of literature available on servant leadership that focuses on the senior or executive level of leadership, Van Dierendonck and Nuijten (2011) have argued that it is also relevant at the middle level of management and have validated an eight dimensional measure of servant leadership that is suitable for this management level. The Van Laar, Edwards and Easton (2007) Quality of Worklife model is also argued to be an appropriate model and measure of the Quality of Worklife construct, due to the robustness of the instrument design and the appropriateness of its underlying theory to the context of this research. Research has shown that leadership can have a significant relationship with Quality of Worklife. Moreover, a review of the literature on servant leadership reveals that trust, satisfaction, general well-being, and commitment to their jobs increases when employees are exposed to leadership behaviours associated with servant leadership. There is however, no evidence in the literature of any investigation of the relationship between Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife, or of research investigating the partial mediating effects of Trust between these two constructs. Research was conducted to test this relationship. A survey questionnaire was administered amongst a sample of 555 Contact Centre agents, who were employed in eight different organisations. Confirmatory factor analysis procedures were conducted in STATA (V15.0), to test and validate the factor structure of Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife models. The research also produced a Servant Leadership, Trust and Quality of Worklife structural equation model that supported the hypotheses of the relationships between the constructs. Mediation analysis confirmed Trust’s role as a mediator between Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife. The structural equation model confirmed that synergies between Servant Leadership, Trust and Quality of Worklife exist, and that Trust partially mediates the relationship between Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife. It is therefore argued that an increase in Servant Leadership behaviour by the manager or supervisor of frontline staff has a positive association with increases of Trust, as well as positive associations with Quality of Worklife experienced by employees in the frontline context. Moreover, it is also posited that the relationship between Servant Leadership and Quality of Worklife is partially mediated by Trust of the supervisor. The implications of these results are discussed, and recommendations made for management practice and further research.

Magister Commercii (Industrial Psychology) - MCom(IPS) / School principals and teachers play a vital role of imparting the important skills required for successful learning performance and further education and training (Mahembe & Engelbrecht, 2013). Teachers are responsible for the production of quality primary and secondary school graduates who will constitute the future human capital base for the country to be able to achieve its competitive advantage. The role of the principal as a servant leader is vital to an academic institution such a school. A principal that adopts a servant leadership approach enables teachers and the School Management Team (SMT) to function as a collective and potentially improve or create an environment conducive for governance, teaching and learning. Therefore, effective leadership is essential to develop good schools with teachers that trust their leader, are satisfied in their jobs, feel empowered and will go beyond the call of duty. A principal as a servant leader, including a departmental head, can shape the school working environment to provide greater opportunities for exhibiting positive behaviors and outcomes that are likely to promote job satisfaction and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The purpose of the current research study is to answer the question, "What is the influence of servant leadership on trust, psychological empowerment, job satisfaction and OCB amongst teachers at selected schools in the Western Cape Province?" In order to answer the research question explaining the hypothesised relationships, the research study developed a theoretical model and tested an explanatory structural model to explain the manner in which servant leadership influences trust, psychological empowerment, job satisfaction and organisational citizenship behaviour. The study was conducted using teachers drawn from selected schools in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The participants were asked to complete five self-reporting questionnaires comprising the Servant Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), the Leadership Trust Scale (LTS), Measuring Empowerment Questionnaire (MEQ), Job Satisfaction Scale (JSS), and the Organisational Citizenship Behaviour Scale (OCBS). A total of 203 (n=203) questionnaires were returned out of a distributed total of 330 questionnaires. Item and dimensionality analyses were conducted on all of the dimensions using SPSS version 23. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was executed on the measurement models of the instruments used. The proposed conceptual model was evaluated using structural equation modelling (SEM) via the LISREL version 8.80 software. It was found that both the measurement and structural models fitted the data reasonably well. The results indicated a significant and positive relationship between servant leadership and trust; servant leadership and psychological empowerment; servant leadership and job satisfaction; psychological empowerment and trust; psychological empowerment and job satisfaction; and psychological empowerment and OCB. However, there is a non-significant relationship between servant leadership and OCB. Furthermore, the relationship between job satisfaction and OCB is negative and insignificant. This study will add significance to the body of knowledge by attempting to give insight as to whether servant leadership influences teachers towards engaging in extra role behaviours. The practical implications of the study and limitations are discussed as well as the direction for future research studies.

There is a general scarcity of empirical studies investigating the impact of leadership styles on e-Government use in the service industry. This is doubly true of styles such as transformational, transactional and servant leadership. Theorised models propose that leadership style forms the desired organisational culture for implementing e-services, organisational culture being the mediator and the national culture the moderator. This research fills the empirical gap by investigating how leadership forms the organisational culture that facilitates and enhances the implementation and use of e-government in organisations in Saudi Arabia. The research was conducted through the sampling of employees in private and public sectors. While the data for the leadership styles, organisational culture and national culture were collected through the use of questionnaires designed for employees, the e-services were measured through organizations’ official websites. All data were processed and analysed using computer software (WarPPLS) and SPSS. The results support the hypothesized relationships proposed in the theoretical model, wherein all constructs under study (except for the mediating effect of National Culture (NC) on the relationship between leadership styles and organisational culture) positively affect e-services implementation, including Individualized Influence (IINF), Intellectual Stimulation (ISTIM), Individualized Support (ISUP), Contingent Reward (CR), Management by Exception (MbE), Servant Leadership (SL), Bureaucratic Culture (BC), Involvement Culture (INVC), Mission Culture (MC), Innovative Culture (INC), Task Culture (TC) and Future Culture (FC) and the mediating effect of National Culture (NC) on the relationship between organisational culture and e-services implementation. The results also indicated that specific leadership styles have direct and positive impacts on e-services implementation and indirect influences through a mediating organisational culture and a moderating national culture. The empirical findings bring new evidence in support of this proposal, indicating that specific leadership styles play crucial roles in influencing processes and outcomes within organizations. According to these results, e-services differ from one organization to another, and these variations were correlated to leadership styles and organizational culture. It was found that there were positive and significant correlations between total leadership styles (hybrid) and total organizational cultures (hybrid) in the full sample and in e-services implementation. E-services implementation increases when the mean for leadership styles rises, but types of organizational culture were also crucial factors in achieving better e-services. The national culture variable, which was used as a moderator, did not have a significant influence on the relationship between leadership style and organisational culture. Therefore, the moderating role of national culture in the relationship between leadership styles and organisational culture did not have any level of statistical significance, which means that regardless of the national culture (power distance or uncertainty avoidance) the effect of leadership style on organisational culture in the model adopted in this study appeared to be quite consistent. The study links theory to practice by explaining the subject of modern leadership styles and shows their relevance to the Saudi organisations and business environment. As such, it opens up a domain for investigating the application of modern management theories in a different culture. Although a plethora of studies have investigated the effect of factors such as organisational culture and/or national culture on e-services implementation in Saudi’s organisations, no study (to the best of this writer's knowledge) has tackled the issue of e-services implementation and leadership styles in those organisations. Therefore, studying e-services implementation and leadership styles in Saudi’s organisations is a contribution to the literature on the service industry, adding to its knowledge with a case study from a different cultural setting. The study also opens up a horizon for future research on developing the business sector, as it uses standardized tools in terms of reliability and validity within the context of the e-services implementation. Therefore, this study contributes to existing knowledge in that leadership and organisational culture are revealed to be key contributors to e-services implementation. The three leadership styles - transformational, transactional, and servant leadership - were empirically found to be appropriate styles that work well in e-services implementation projects. These styles have direct and positive benefits to e-services implementation and an indirect impact through the mediating means of organisational culture, and empirical findings bring new evidence for this notion. Moreover, the six organisational cultural dimensions were judged to be appropriate supporters of e-services implementation, specifically: involvement, mission, innovation, task-orientation, bureaucracy, and future-orientation.