The New Frontier of Servant Leadership

This conceptual article identifies the importance of commitment and emotional intelligence as modifications to the seven-variable original Patterson (2003) model of servant leadership that was extended by Winston (2003) as a circular model of interaction, and then further extended by Cerff and Winston (2006) to include hope as part of a virtuous construct. A reconfiguration of the leader side of Patterson’s (2003) model is advanced after an integrative consideration of current streams of Servant Leadership research and the traits they espouse. This hybrid model includes leader commitment and emotional intelligence as distinct characteristics of the theory. The leader’s agapao love, mediated by humility and altruism, affects leader commitment which is informed by vision and hope. Commitment borne from vision and hope results in empowerment which is mediated by trust and emotional intelligence, and results in service to the follower. The hybrid model provides essentially a four-sectioned design that reflects recent and extant research on the subject and may support empirical analysis that yields reliable quantitative assessment and furthers the useful ness of the theory.