CHRISTIAN FAITH PERSPECTIVES IN LEADERSHIP AND BUSINESS Biblical Servant Leadership An Exploration of Leadership for the Contemporary Context

Abstract

Though leadership has been an issue of discussion for many centuries, as well as among recent researchers, there has been little agreement on the description of leadership. In the twentieth century, leadership has been a topic of study by researchers with no consensus on the definition of lead ership, but only that it concerns influence in the accomplishment of group objectives (House, Hanges, Javidian, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). T his vast array of differing conceptions of leadership has created a bewil dering body of literature with differences from one writer to another in the field of leadership (Yukl, 2012). However, in the midst of this discus sion has entered the concept of spirituality as found in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and its impact on leadership. Weber (1968) based his concepts for religious leadership upon the lives of certain religious leaders, like Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, and Jesus. Nevertheless, McClymond (2001) found it striking that there was not much discussion of religious leadership among scholars in the twentieth century. Yet, with the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a turn to spirituality in leadership studies (Bekker, 2008). This turn to spirituality has included the development of theories of leadership with a spiritual component like spiritual leadership (Fry, 2003), servant leadership (Patterson, 2003), and authentic leadership (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, & May, 2004; Klenke, 2007). This turn to spirituality in leadership studies has also included distinctively Christian leadership models like kenotic leadership