Healing a Broken Spirit: Role of Servant Leadership

What is it about?

The aim of the present study was to have an in-depth understanding of the approach adopted by servant leaders to manage the emotional turmoil of their employees. Our results suggest that the servant leaders adopt a compassionate approach to manage employees’ emotional turmoil. All three parts of the process of compassion, described by Clark and Kanov are clearly visible in the statements of our respondents. Their inherent characteristics of empathy and compassion automatically orient the servant leaders toward immediate awareness of followers’ suffering. This awareness leads to felt /experienced empathic concern and compassion that triggers in them an urge to take some action to relieve the suffering of the followers.

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Why is it important?

By highlighting the approach adopted by servant leaders to alleviate the suffering of their employees and restore their emotional balance, based on leaders’ personal accounts of their experiences, perspectives and reflections, our study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of an empirically least explored field. The qualitative methods and techniques used for data collection and analysis gave us an in depth understanding of how servant leaders experience compassion and take action to alleviate suffering of their emotionally disturbed subordinates. Three-part process of compassion suggested by Clark (1997) and Kanov et al. (2004) is clearly discernible in this study i.e., attending to the suffering of the employee, feeling empathetic with the employee and taking action to alleviate his/her suffering. Use of this three-part process by our respondents establishes that servant leaders use compassion for emotional healing. Davenport (2015) observed that “compassion entails a deep caring and concern for one another- an attribute found in a servant leader as well. So, it is possible that servant leadership and compassion can and should coexist.” Servant leaders, with a compassionate approach towards handling employees’ emotional suffering, can play a crucial role in defining and creating an organizational environment in which the employees can experience better affective well-being and emotional health. Emotionally healthy employees can certainly perform better than emotionally less-healthy employees. To put it in the words of one of our servant leaders, the better the employees perform, the more they grow, and so, the more the organization will grow.