Servant Leadership Predictors of Team Effectiveness: Findings and Implications

Interest in the theory and practice of teams in organizations has grown dramatically in recent years as evidenced by studies such as LaFasto and Larson’s (2001) research with over 6,000 team members and leaders. While there have been explorations into what characterizes effective teams, very little has been done to demonstrate what leadership behaviors, both at the organizational level and at the individual leader level, are best able to explain the presence of effectiveness at the team level. In this paper, the authors present findings from a study of over 700 participants. These research participants were drawn from an international non-profit organization that is known for its use of team-based structures. Participants were asked to take three instruments: (a) The Organizational Leadership Assessment, (b) The Servant Leadership Assessment Instrument, and (c) The Team Effectiveness Questionnaire. The study was designed to examine the effect of servant leadership on team effectiveness, and specifically to identify the independent variables related to servant leadership that are best able to explain team effectiveness and then based upon this to propose a model for understanding servant leadership predictors of team effectiveness. By means of multiple regression analyses, the following model of independent variables was able to explain 39% of the variance in the effectiveness of teams: (a) servant leadership at the organizational level, (b) the servant leadership behavior of love at the individual leader level, (c) job satisfaction at the individual participant level, and (d) the servant leadership behavior of vision at the individual leader level. The model had a significance level of .000000. Based on these findings the authors conclude this paper with a discussion of the implications for organizational and team leadership. INTRODUCTION Interest in the theory and practice of teams has grown dramatically in recent years as evidenced by studies such as LaFasto and Larson’s (2001) research with over 6,000 team members and leaders. This emergence of teams may be traced, in part, back to societal shifts that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s. One student of the impact of these shifts on organizational life was Robert K. Greenleaf. Writing in the 1970’s, Greenleaf (1977) noted that in light of the revolution of expectation among young people, one who presides over a successful business “will need to evolve from being the chief into the builder of the team” (p. 85). It is arguable that such societal and organizational observations are even more relevant today as leaders seek to engage the question of how organizations will be led in the increasingly decentralized and team-based structures that are a growing mark of systems in the 21 century.