Fortifying servant leadership’s foundations: five core questions to guide future research

Servant leadership research is rapidly accumulating, but the degree to which it advances the broader leadership literature with novel insights remains a contentious point of debate. Skeptics argue that the validity of servant leadership’s theoretical foundation and its empirical measures are questionable. Supporters, however, point to servant leadership’s unique focus on service to multiple stakeholders as well as meta-analyses supporting its incremental predictive validity relative to other moral and inspirational leadership approaches as evidence of its novelty in the leadership domain. These two camps seldom engage in constructive dialogue to advance the field in a purposeful, productive, and practical way. The purpose of this editorial is a twofold approach to bridge this gap. First, we introduce a servant leadership special issue in Group and Organization Management (GOM) that brings together emerging and established scholars, as well as a seasoned practitioner, to address shortcomings in extant servant leadership scholarship and articulate new ideas that promise to usher the literature into a new era of insights. Second, we discuss five core questions to fortify the foundations of servant leadership research. These questions pertain to servant leadership’s nomological network, empirical and theoretical overlap with other leadership constructs, theoretical boundaries, dimensionality, and empirical validity. We hope this GOM special issue and editorial paint a constructive and promising path forward for the next era of servant leadership research and practice.