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At the heart of this paper is the notion that servant-leadership has potential as a feminism-informed, care-oriented, and gender-integrative approach to organizational leadership. Although there is a significant body of literature on feminist and gender-based interpretations of leadership, the same is not true for servant-leadership. The main contributors to date include Crippen's (2004) narrative inquiry of three women servant-leaders, Eicher-Catt's (2005) feminist critique of servant-leadership, Oner's (2009) and Barbuto and Gifford's (2010) empirical studies of gender differences in servant-leadership, and Ngunjiri's (2010) phenomenological study of African women servant-leaders.
This paper expands the conceptual development of servant-leadership through a feminist framework. The intent is to explore whether the servant-leadership philosophy has potential as a gender-integrative mode of leadership. Gaps in previous research are addressed through a broader scope of feminist analysis and inquiry to servant-leadership. I present a literature review that builds on discussions of gender and feminist perspectives of leadership and servant-leadership in the context of leadership theory, gender, and feminist critique.
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON LEADERSHIP
Traditional perspectives of leadership assume inherent systems of influence and structure for human organization (Chin 2007). Northouse (2007) offered an example of a typical definition of leadership from a popular textbook: "Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal" (3). Smírcích and Morgan (1982) offered a definition of the leadership process from a feminist perspective: "Leadership is realized in the process whereby one or more individuals succeed in attempting to frame and define the reality of others" (258). Based on the notion that some person (or group) mobilizes systems of power (framing and defining reality) over some other(s) toward the achievement of some goal (framed and defined by whom?) through human organization, leadership especially merits interpretation from a feminist perspective.
In my experience while studying leadership, my fellow colleagues have often expressed common misconceptions about what feminism comprises. There seems to be confusion about what a feminist perspective entails. Some have assumed that if a woman authors a paper, she has implicitly represented a feminist (i.e., a woman's) perspective. Others have assumed that if the participants in a study are exclusively women, or if the study includes gender as a variable, these studies have necessarily adopted a feminist perspective. If...