The concept of Servant Leadership was introduced by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, and although in his works there is a very clear picture of servant leadership in philosophical terms, there is not an empirically validated definition of servant leadership. For this reason, numerous scholars worked individually on developing competing frameworks to define servant leadership since the mid-1990s; the result is that, throughout the scientific literature, the construct of servant leadership is defined by an inconsistent set of dimensions and there is still no consensus about an operational definition of the construct. In a similar way, since the end of the 1990s, numerous scholars developed different scales to measure servant leadership, based on different operational definitions. Accordingly, there is not an agreed upon measure of Servant Leadership; a few measures were used in a limited number of studies, and a relatively large number of measures were used in less than two. The chapter presents the most significant and used operational definitions, a detailed description of the development of the different measuring instruments, as well as a reference to some of the studies that used them, and a final section where the advantages and disadvantages of using certain measures are presented.
Does Servant Leadership Behavior Induce Positive Behaviors? A Conceptual Study of Servant Leadership, Psychological Safety and Turnover Intention
