Exploring Servant Leadership across Cultures: A Study of Followers in Ghana and the USA

In the shadow of corporate scandals such as Enron and Worldcom, an increase in attention has been directed towards an approach termed `servant leadership'. To date, servant leadership has been discussed and described almost entirely in the North American context (Farling et al., 1999; Spears, 1995). In the following study, we explored the extent to which followers from Ghana and the USA have experienced three servant leadership dimensions in a work situation, and the extent to which these followers relate servant leadership dimensions to judgments about leadership effectiveness in each culture. After testing for measurement equivalence and adjusting the item weights in each culture, we found that Ghanaians reported experiencing servant leadership behaviours significantly less than North Americans. We also found that vision had a significantly stronger relationship with leader effectiveness for Ghanaians in comparison to North Americans, but that both sub-samples relate service and humility with leader effectiveness similarly. We explored possible explanations and implications based on cultural differences.