Servant Leadership Research in Emerging Economies : An overview

Abstract

Servant leadership is a leadership style characterized by service to the subordinates. An important tenet of servant leadership is that servant leaders transcend their own interests for the interests of the community/members/subordinates. So far, a significant portion of prior research on servant leadership has been undertaken in the developed (primarily Western) economies’ context. Emerging economies, on the other hand, have received rather little attention. Also, a systematic review of servant leadership research in emerging economies has not been done by prior scholars. Hence, the current chapter aims to fill these gaps in the extant literature. The chapter comprehensively examines servant leadership in emerging economies by utilizing two distinct yet complementary review methods, i.e. bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review. The findings present the state of servant leadership research in emerging economies in terms of focus and theories used, contributions to literature, and geographical focus. Finally, the chapter presents gaps in existing research linked to future research directions on servant leadership in emerging economies, empirically, methodologically, and conceptually.