Power of Attachment Styles in Servant Leadership: A Conceptual Paper

The paper aims to advance an understanding of the relationship between servant leadership and attachment styles. This paper provides a review of servant leadership and attachment styles to explain how this understanding can be used to confront challenges faced by leaders due to a crisis. A proposed conceptual model is posited to investigate the moderating effect of followers' attachment styles on the relationship between servant leadership and desired follower outcomes. Additionally, this study adds support to the criticism of the leader-centric approach of research by investigating the moderating role of followers' characteristics, such as followers' attachment styles. The practical implications of this study highlight how servant leadership can positively revolutionise relationships at work, thereby making it an interesting field for research and practice. Introduction The need for leadership arises out of the desire of organisations to accomplish their objectives in the most effective way. Organisations need effective leaders “to plan, organise, provide direction, and exercise control over organisational resources, material, and human, in order to achieve the organisation’s objectives” (Kanungo, 2001, p.257). Abusive supervision is the “subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which superiors engage in the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviours, excluding physical contact” (Tepper, 2000. p.178) is a pervasive issue in workplaces today. Some major characteristic behaviours include invasion of privacy, inappropriately assigning blame, ridiculing publicly, rudeness, and taking undue credit (Tepper et al., 2006). Research has found abusive supervision is associated with lower employee job satisfaction, lower life satisfaction, lower normative and affective commitment, higher family-to-work conflict, higher employee depression, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion (Tepper, 2000). An employee’s view on what accounts for good leadership has dramatically changed. The idea of a hierarchical-oriented heroic leader with primary regard to shareholders needs to be replaced with leadership that is both virtuous and ethical, a leadership that prioritises altruism, humility, ethical behaviour, and agape love through service to other people (Van Dierendonck & Patterson, 2010). Servant Leadership might be able to deal with the challenges of our modern-day workplace, which may be the reason why organisations that implement servant leadership continue to rise (e.g., Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Container Store, Zappos), thus encouraging more research into Servant Leadership (Eva et al., 2019). STACY MENEZES GOA, INDIA