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Role Of Serving And Leading Into One Philosophy Of Servant Leadership

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Servers are thought to be submissive followers and leaders are thought to be powerful decision makers and as contrast as serving and leading can seam to be at first thought they can have much more overlapping roles. Helping others so they will in turn help you is by no means a new concept; it is one that has in fact been around for at least the last two thousand years. However, it was Robert K Greenleaf that took that general idea and reshaped the roles of serving and leading molding then into one philosophy of Servant Leadership (Keith, 2015). Greenleaf’s concept was that “the servant-leader is servant first” meaning not that a leader should be slavish or submissive but that they should have a desire to know the needs of others and ensure those needs are meet (Keith, 2015).
In 1904, Greenleaf graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota, he went to work for AT&T, continuing to research management, development, and education (Gill, 2015). During this period of time in the United State the classical management was leading management style (Gill, 2015). The classical management put emphasis on structure with an organizational hierarchy and division of small repetitive task; employees had narrow fields and were not expected to multi task (Russ, 2015). This strict authoritarian leadership approach is designed to give management easier control over the employees whose motivation was increased by monetary rewards (Russ,2015).
Greenleaf had a growing skepticism of the

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