Synthesis
Summary
The main point of the article by Stone et al. (2004) is that the primary difference between servant and transformational leadership is the focus of each: the servant leader focuses on the follower and making sure the follower is reaching his potential as a person and professional; the transformational leaders focus is on the organization and making sure workers are committed to the organizations goals. Aside from this difference, both styles of leadership are depicted as dynamic and as impacting the character of the worker for the better. The secondary point of the article is that servant leadership faces challenges in scholarship and in the workplace because it is difficult to measure and to empirically investigate; however, the researchers do note that new thoughts on servant leadership and its benefits are arising in academia. Overall, the article focuses on how transformational and servant leadership have a lot in commonsuch as both using vision, trust, communication, empowerment, and motivation to inspire followers. Whereas transformational leaders motivate and communicate a vision in order to obtain buy-in from workers, servant leaders motivate and communicate a vision in order to promote self-leadership.
Stone et al. (2004) also point out that the two leadership styles are...
…from one another by the end of the article, and it was also easy to understand the challenges that face servant leadership in modern scholarship. The issue with servant leadership is that measuring it depends more on
qualitative methods than
quantitative methods, whereas with transformational leadership, one can see how effective it is based on whether goals are being met. In reality, though, this same approach to measuring the effectiveness of the style could be applied to servant leadership, even though its focus is on the person and not on the organizational goals. In the end, the purpose is to help…
