Teachers' Perceptions of Empowerment Through Servant Leadership Using Latent Profile Analysis: A Person-Centered Approach to Community-Based Education

Abstract Community Education models follow Freire’s critical pedagogy of empowering marginalized communities through a transformative pedagogy, yet leadership practices enabling facilitator empowerment remain underexplored. This study investigates the extent to which community school facilitators perceive their leadership as aligned with servant leadership, with empowerment as the most extensively measured construct in the instrument alongside other servant leadership dimensions (humility, stewardship, accountability, authenticity, forgiveness, courage, and standing back). Using the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS) administered to 271 female facilitators across six governorates, we employed latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify distinct patterns of leadership perceptions. Descriptive statistics revealed that facilitators perceive high levels of empowerment (M = 4.19) and stewardship (M = 4.21), while courage showed the lowest mean (M = 2.55). The Partial Correlation Network analysis shows Humility and Empowerment as the most central and positively connected traits, with tentative links through Authenticity and Stewardship and a perceived tension between Forgiveness and Courage. LPA identified four distinct profiles: Compassionate Leadership (23%, high forgiveness, low accountability/courage), Enterprising Leadership (29%, high courage, low forgiveness), Empowering Leadership (38%, high on empowerment, stewardship, humility, accountability, forgiveness), and Visionary Leadership (13%, highest on courage, authenticity, standing back, accountability). Findings reveal that facilitators experience leadership heterogeneously, with empowerment manifesting differently across profiles. Results suggest that leadership development in community education should be profile-tailored rather than uniform, and that servant leadership provides a theoretically grounded framework for understanding the varied conditions through which facilitator empowerment is enabled.