International Journal of Servant-Leadership
Abstract
On the first occasion I spoke in public about my commitment to the principles of servant-leadership, I told the story of a manager who, on hearing me discuss being a servant-leader, saw it as an opportunity to develop his career. The latest thinking, any new idea being discussed by senior management, could be used as a fashionable shibboleth to help advance that career. With this potential misuse of servant-leadership in mind, I made my way toward the conclusion of my lecture: There is an understandable temptation to see the concept of servant-leadership as something so important that one has to do all one can to retain the purity of the message ... At the same time, if one engages in ... spreading the message, then, inevitably, new adherents may use areas of servant-leadership for their own ends. It's a matter of purity versus popularity. And it is to this issue of "purity versus popularity" that I wish to return, although I must stress that when I mentioned originally that new adherents may use areas of servant-leadership for their own ends I could have worded that more elegantly, as I certainly did not mean it in a blunt pejorative sense-I meant that people may interpret servant-leadership in different ways, in ways not entirely consistent with Greenleaf's thinking.
Recommended Citation
Prosser, Stephen
(2009)
"“Purity Versus Popularity”: Potential Opportunities and Tensions Among the Differing Emphases of Servant-Leadership,"
International Journal of Servant-Leadership: Vol. 5, Article 8.
DOI: 10.33972/ijsl.213
Available at:
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/ijsl/vol5/iss1/8
Copyright Information
Copyright 2009 The Author(s). All rights reserved