Servant Leadership: Women in Executive-Level Positions

Servant Leadership: Women in Executive-Level Positions

Veneice Smith | 2023

Abstract

This study focused on follower perception of women in executive-level positions and servant leadership, a paradigm that closely aligns with communal (feminine) leadership characteristics most often observed in the leadership style of women (Cox, 1995; Davis, 2017; Hogue, 2016; Kusterer, 2008; Kusterer et al., 2013; Lehrke & Sowden, 2017). This study contextualized the antecedents of gender and social cognition (Bussey & Bandura, 1999) to discuss perception, women in executive-level positions, and the seven servant leadership virtues identified by Patterson (2003) through the lens of implicit leadership theory (Shondrick et al., 2010). By discovering that perceived communal values are related to perceived servant leadership, a theoretical leadership model that transcends social normative leadership, this research aligned with existing research by Barbuto and Gifford (2010), Song et al. (2022), Hogue (2016), and Lehrke and Sowden (2017) who found that communal leadership aligns with servant leadership. Additionally, this research revealed that most servant leadership characteristics are related to agentic values, suggesting androgyny in women’s leadership, as Bem (1979) noted. As few studies focus on the antecedents of gender with servant leadership (Barbuto & Gifford, 2010; Eva et al., 2019; Liu, 2019), this empirical research on the gender-based implicit theory and follower perception in conjunction with servant leadership continues to lay the foundation for further research on women in leadership.