Servant leadership has twenty years of studies behind it and predicts outcomes organizations care about. It also has sixteen competing measures and, in the words of the field's own systematic review, a lack of coherence that has held back its theory. Both things are true, and a buyer should hear the second one from me rather than from someone else.
Greenleaf, 1977
Liden and colleagues, 2008 and 2015
van Dierendonck, 2011
Most leadership models start from the organization's needs and ask what the leader must do to meet them. Servant leadership inverts that: the leader's first obligation is to the growth and wellbeing of the people they lead, and organizational performance follows from it rather than driving it.
In the formulation my own research used, it has seven dimensions: emotional healing, creating value for the community, conceptual skills, empowering, helping followers grow and succeed, putting followers first, and behaving ethically.
It is easy to hear that as a soft idea. The research literature does not treat it as one — it is measured, modelled and tested like any other construct, and that is precisely why it can be held to the standard on this page.
16
different measures of servant
leadership, evaluated in one review
In 2019, five researchers — including two of the people whose scales are most widely used — published a systematic review of 285 servant leadership articles spanning 1998 to 2018 in The Leadership Quarterly.
Their opening sentence is not a defence of the field. It says that despite more than 100 articles in the preceding four years, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its theory development.
They then evaluate sixteen existing measures against the rigour of their construction and validation, and propose a new definition because the existing ones did not agree.
When a vendor says "servant leadership is proven to improve retention," the honest follow-up is: measured with which of the sixteen? Studies using different instruments are not straightforwardly measuring the same thing, which makes the literature harder to add up than its volume suggests.
It does not mean the construct is empty. It means the confidence interval around any summary claim is wider than the number of published studies implies.
My doctoral research asked what followers' perception of servant leadership was doing to their own psychological capital — the hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism they had available for their work.
Follower-perceived servant leadership accounted for 44.2% of the variance in follower psychological capital. Tested against one another, the only dimension that predicted it over and above the rest was empowerment — not the mentoring-and-development dimension I had predicted, and which most leadership programmes are built around.
One data collection across two sites, roughly 90% of it from a single organization. Correlational, so it cannot establish which way the causal arrow points. Self-reported at both ends.
Most importantly for this page: the instrument used carries one item per dimension. Every dimension-level claim — including the empowerment finding that most flatters my practice — rests on a single survey question. I conceded that in the dissertation and I am not going to stop conceding it here.
As the reason the diagnostics point at followers rather than at the leader. If what a leader does is measurable from the other side of the relationship, and accounts for a substantial share of what their people have available for a hard year, then surveying the executive team about itself is the wrong instrument pointed the wrong way.
And as a development focus with a specific emphasis: empowerment — decision rights, latitude, the authority to act — ahead of the mentoring conversation most coaching programmes lead with. With the single-item caveat attached every time, because it is attached in the underlying research.
One constraint, stated plainly. The servant leadership scales used in my dissertation were obtained by permission limited to scientific research and not-for-profit work. Citing the findings is not the same as administering the instrument — the research can be discussed freely, and is, on this site. Administering those scales in a paid engagement requires the authors' permission, and that is a line worth naming rather than quietly crossing.
Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111–132. Source of the 285 articles, the sixteen measures, and the quoted statement on conceptual clarity.
Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(2). The SL-28.
Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Meuser, J. D., Hu, J., Wu, J., & Liao, C. (2015). Servant leadership: Validation of a short form of the SL-28. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(2). The SL-7, used in my dissertation.
van Dierendonck, D. (2011). Servant leadership: A review and synthesis. Journal of Management, 37(4).
Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Paulist Press.
Hoch, J. E., Bommer, W. H., Dulebohn, J. H., & Wu, D. (2018). Do ethical, authentic, and servant leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), 501–529. Listed because it is directly relevant; its figures are not quoted here because the full text is paywalled and this site does not quote numbers it has not read.
Davis, L. (2018). The Relationship Between Servant Leadership and Psychological Capital: A Follower's Perspective. Ed.D. dissertation, George Washington University. Open access →
Reviewed September 2026. If something on this page is wrong, write and say so — corrections are published.
The dominant construct in the same family, and the critique aimed at it.
Strong · licence requiredThe outcome in this practice’s own doctoral research.
Moderate · real · self-reportedWhether coaching toward any of this actually moves anything.
Every construct this practice uses gets the same treatment, including the ones that make it look good and the ones that do not.