Servant Leadership and the Spirituality of Music in Crisis Management

Abstract

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.