Servant Leadership Attributes for Non-Profit Organizations in a Developing Country: An Exploratory Survey

Abstract

The study was undertaken in response to calls in extant literature for extension of servant leadership empirical work into new contexts. The study was done as an exploratory research in a developing country context, Kenya using an integrated set of servant leadership attributes drawn from previous work on servant leadership with the aim of finding out which servant leadership attributes are applicable to the non-profit sector and how the NGO institutional characteristics condition the application of the servant leadership practices. Data was obtained from 365 respondents drawn from 72 religious non-profit organizations in Kenya and analysed using exploratory factor analysis. Ten attributes of servant leadership were extracted with their corresponding set of operational indicators. The institutional context was found to condition servant leadership practices among the non-profit organizations through institutional isomorphism. The extracted 10 factors indicate that servant leadership attributes are relevant for applications in the non-profit sector and require the conceptual and theoretical input of the contingency and institutional theories. Keywords: Institutional context, Non-profit organizations, Religious non-profit organizations, Servant leadership, Servant leadership components