Servant leadership works best in the Netherlands
Servant leadership is leadership from a servant’s heart. Servant leadsers use their power to empower others. Servant leaders serve a higher goal than their own or their organizations’ interests. Servant leader serve others’ interests before their own interests. Servant leaders grow servant leaders.
How does such kind of leadership work in different cultures, like e.g. in the United States; Germany and the Netherlands?
Maureen Hannay has applied Hofstede’s characteristics to determine the best cultural fit with servant leadership theory.
Hofstede identified and validated five independent dimensions of national culture differences: power distance, individualism, masculinity versus feminism, uncertainty avoidance, and longterm versus shortterm orientation.
Hannay’s results:
Servant leadership works best in a culture with
- low power distance,
- low to moderate degree of individualism,
- low to moderate degree of masculinity,
- low degree of uncertainty avoidance, and
- moderate to high long-term orientation.
According to Hannay the two dimensions, power distance and uncertainty avoidance are most critical for the success of Servant Leadership. In a comparison of ten countries, including the United States and Germany, the Netherlands seems to provide the best environment fit for Servant Leadership. However, none of the countries represent an ideal cultural environment for the application of Servant Leadership.
Hofstede’s characteristics for Germany show low values for power distance and long-term orientation, and high values for individualism, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance. Hofstede’s characteristics for the United States show relatively low values for power distance, long-term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance, a higher value for masculinity and a high value of individualism.
The biggest difference between Germany and the Netherlands in terms of Hofstede’s measures is in the masculinity dimension, where Germany scores over 60, while the Netherlands score only 14.
In a recent article (April 2009) in the business magazine “brandeins” about the differences in the pay between male and female employees, the author remarks after comparing various research results, that actually it is not a matter of the gender as such. It is the economic system in Germany which still rewards male traits like aiming for power, and self-assertion more than female traits like relationship building, or sensitivity, and empathy, which promotes more men than women in highly paid leadership positions.
However, the author is confident that the female traits will be more asked for and paid for in the future. Such a development would go well together with Servant Leadership, which grows best in a culture with a low to moderate degree of masculinity:-)