Servant Leadership and the Spirituality of Music in Crisis Management : Orchestrating Leadership to Develop Servant Organisations

The ways in which organizations manage crises can find significant analogies in the musician's process of improvisation, involving a continuous leader-follower interaction that displays the typical traits of servant leaders fueled by spirituality. The analogy with musical improvisation is the thread that runs through this chapter, which analyzes servant leadership in organizational orchestration with reference to current issues such as distributed work. The conditions that can enable the development of servant organizations are identified, modeling the different contextual dimensions with reference to organizational performance, also with respect to other leadership styles. These enabling factors are also declined with respect to agile management practices and the convergence between spiritual leadership and servant leadership. New research directions are identified: this transformative historical moment offers a unique opportunity to develop in-depth causal inferences about how servant leadership creates ethical and organizational value. The Chapter develops five themes in as many segments: • the first explores the issues and impacts of the evolution from remote to distributed work, a phenomenon that has significantly accelerated as a response to the discontinuities generated by the pandemic crisis and the role that Servant Leadership can play in its developments; • the second segment deals with the challenges raised by the crisis in terms of business ethics and ethical decision-making in times of uncertainty by comparing it with musical improvisation, a practice that involves a deviation from the paths and boundaries of an established set of rules, highlighting the similarities with the practices of Servant Leadership;• in the third the analogies between musical improvisation and shared leadership are contextualized in organizational combinations, showing the conditions in which Servant Leadership can better deploy its effectiveness, also with respect to other leadership styles, notably Situational Leadership; • In the fourth section, the needs of change management, a continuous process of adaptation in 21st century organizations, are read in light of the spread of the concept of Servant Leadership in parallel with the emergence of Agile approaches. Early evidence is presented of how the values that Agile has identified as critical to success resemble those of Servant Leadership and translate into improvements in organizational performance; • the last section introduces the spiritual component of leadership as complementary and consistent with Servant Leadership as nurturing leaders to better relate to followers as well as in organizational performance achievement. A further analogy with musical improvisation is proposed; • indications on future research developments conclude the Chapter