Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Servant Leadership

While the study of servant leadership has steadily moved from theoretical discussions to model development to initial empirical research up through the first decade of the twenty-first century, most of this work has been done in North American and European contexts. Thankfully, this once small literature base focused on servant leadership in broader global and cross-cultural settings continues to grow as more leadership practitioners and researchers explore the value of servant leadership in diverse global contexts. This chapter overviews this expanding work across African, Asian, Latin American, ethnically diverse North American, and other diverse global context perspectives. The literature highlighted in this overview includes a shift from exploratory studies in the early part of the twenty-first century to an increasing number of empirical studies. This expanding literature on servant leadership in cross-cultural contexts points to the positive effect of servant leadership on a growing number of organizational outcomes and to an arguably universal, though culturally varying, cross-cultural validity of servant leadership in diverse cultural contexts.