When and Why Servants Lead and Leaders Serve: Antecedent Paths to Servant Leadership

Servant leadership leans heavily on the central tenet put forth by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s that “the servant-leader is servant first.” As such, the limited literature examining antecedents to servant leadership has focused on prosocial or altruistic motives for servant leadership. We argue that these conceptualizations oversimplify when and why servant leadership emerges and overlook the dual emphases of serving and leading inherent to servant leadership. To remedy these issues, we develop a model which offers a more comprehensive understanding of when and why servant leadership behaviors are enacted as a servant or a leader responds to identity-implicating experiences that motivate them to become a leader or a servant, respectively. Finally, we examine how this addition of a new identity alongside their existing servant or leader identity may result in a synergistic, compatible, or conflicting relationship between the two identities, culminating in varying degrees of servant leadership over time.