Summary
Authored by a practicing CEO, this paper explores—and broadly calls for—a strategic approach to expand servanthood and servant leadership (SL) practice through focused scholarship by examining distinctive qualities and phenomena observed in the field. In order to move SL practice forward, scholars are urged to not only address conventional social science needs, but also practical implementation needs which limit SL’s establishment in practice. I first provide a broad strategic plan with three goals and a framework to approach SL’s strategic distinctions and competitive advantages (the main focus of this paper) consisting of four qualities—servant first, stakeholder focus, first-among-equals (or primus inter pares in Latin), and ethical basis—that differentiate SL among leadership styles. I then identify four key, but under-researched, psychological phenomena which I have observed in the field: individual-level phronesis (practical wisdom), psychological ownership, and joy, as well as group-level interdependence which are proposed as both proximal outcomes of the identified SL strategic distinctions and as distal antecedents to SL in reciprocal deterministic fashion. The nomological net resultant from this theorizing shows that all four psychological constructs have the possibility to enhance and extend the self-determination theory model of SL emergence—adding to SL theory in general and, more specifically, potentially attracting practitioners to consider SL adoption. The paper concludes with a graphical summary of how strategic SL distinctions cause and are caused by a virtuous cycle of servanthood emergence, and highlights SL’s parsimonious alignment with evolved morality to foster collaboration and collective action.