Servant Leadership: A Taxonomic Approach towards Systematic Literature Review

Connection between inferior leadership and massive business meltdown and inadequacy of seasoned leadership models create an urge to seek leadership equipped with ethical behavior, concern for subordinates, all the stakeholders and the society as a whole. This literature survey examines existing literature addressing servant leadership theory. Servant leadership theory has not yet been legitimized as a mainstream leadership theory therefore, it is worthy to examine its antecedents, outcomes and different mediating and moderating mechanisms to have in-depth knowledge of servant leadership concept and to understand how it differs from other mainstream leadership theories. This study analyzed the literature using descriptive approach as proposed by Turnnidge & Côté (2016). The study  has  been  carried  out  in  three  phases.  First  phase  is  concerned  with  screening  of  abstracts  and  citations  related  to  variable  of  interests,  in  second  phase,  peer  discussion  was  made  to  retain  valuable literature and exclusion of literature which does not fall in set criterion. In the third phase, full text of articles and relevant literature were reviewed which were potentially related to and are of interest.  It was found that servant leadership is a different concept which is more comprehensive and predicts more positive outcomes than its predecessor leadership models. Systematic literature review provided detailed insight with respect to servant leadership theory and its outcomes which led to the development of taxonomy which was further used to develop integrated model of causal fl ow  through  mediating  and  moderating  mechanisms;  and  then  was  further  refined  to  identify servant leadership interaction with different organization and behavioral variables. Findings of this research suggest possible impact of servant leadership in power distant culture which is inconsistent in contemporary research and needs to be investigated for validation of servant leadership’s concept in Third World countries.