A Conceptual Model for Community-Building through Servant-Leadership at Different Organizational Levels

Abstract

Community lays the foundation for a strong, flourishing society. It interconnects individuals, organizations, and societies by encouraging shared vision and mutual respect among all parties involved. The term community has two primary uses: (1) geographic and (2) relational, where geographic describes community as a physical location while relational refers to a community in terms of its psychological closeness to and quality of relationships with others (Gusfield, 1975). McMillan and Chavis (1986) build on the relational concept, stating that a “sense of community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (p. 9). When we lack a sense of community – a sense of belonging, being valued, and being cared for, despite whether it is on an individual, organizational, or societal level – we fail to satisfy the relational desire of our nature as social beings. Unfortunately, as societies grow and develop, people may begin to lose their sense of community as they grow farther apart from each other both geographically and relationally. Greenleaf wrote in 1970 that “human society can be much better than it is (or was) in primitive communities. But if community itself is lost in the process of development, will what is put in its place survive?” (p. 38). In modern culture, which has evolved to reward self-absorption through the accumulation of likes and views on social media platforms, society seems to have forgotten how to effectively relate to and genuinely care for each other out of an unlimited love for one another (Greenleaf, 1970). While Greenleaf (1970) presented building community as a characteristic of servant-leadership based on his own thoughts and conceptual connections, the current literature on servant-leadership and building community has focused primarily on defining servant-leadership and developing models that portray the dimensions and characteristics of servant-leadership, then attempting to gain empirical support for “building community” as such a dimension. This empirical evidence suggests that the presence of community is related to servant-leadership and offers servant- leadership as a potential variable that yields and builds unity and togetherness within a society. However, we are left questioning: What does building community look like practically through the lens of servant-leadership at an individual, organizational, and societal level? The extant literature offers conceptual frameworks and empirical support for the existence of building community as a dimension of servant-leadership, but there are gaps in the literature concerning (1) what building community looks like in the real world, (2) what building community looks like at different levels of influence in an organization, and (3) how building community can be executed at different levels of influence in an organization. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a conceptual model depicting how servant-leadership can lead to community-building in an organization through various interceding mechanisms at an individual, organizational, and societal level.