Servant Leadership: Approaching the Paradox from the Life-Stories of Ping Fu

Servant leadership is a paradox ... How can a person be a leader and a servant at the same time? Although servant leadership seems contradictory and challenges our traditional beliefs about leadership, it is an approach that offers a unique perspective.(Northouse, 2013: 219)I was still shy then ... However, I was assertive in our assignments, going above and beyond ... and driving our team to achieve excellence. Years later, I would find this approach written about in business management textbooks: it was a leadership style known as "servant leadership."(Fu & Fox, 2012: 64)The paradoxical notion of the servant leader was originated by Greenleaf (1970), largely based on his belief that service towards others is an essential element of human nature (Leduc, 2003). "However, despite its introduction four decades ago and empirical studies that started more than 10 years ago (Laub, 1999), there is still no consensus about a definition and theoretical framework of servant leadership" (van Dierendonck, 2011: 1229). In an attempt to resolve this conceptual confusion, van Dierendonck (2011) analyzed the plethora of models inspired by Greenleaf's ideas, to offer a broad framework emphasizing the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of servant leadership. Regrettably, we still lack sufficient studies that describe servant leadership in practice, as the preponderance of servant leader writing has been prescriptive (Northouse, 2013). This leaves many fundamental questions unanswered (Parris & Peachey, 2013). As a result, Whetstone (2002: 390) suggested that the questions surrounding servant leadership might be "best answered by observing leaders genuinely adopting servant leadership."The above autobiographical reference to her own servant leadership style was made by an extraordinary entrepreneurial leader, Ping Fu, the founder and CEO of Geomagic, a 3D digital technology company. As we will show, the story of her strength, courage, and resilience in serving those in her sphere of influence is remarkable. With current calls for more examinations of leaders actually practicing servant leadership, we argue that consideration of a contemporary leader whose philosophy, motivations, and practices resonate with, and in some ways reconcile, the paradoxical concept of leader as servant is warranted. Accordingly, we analyzed her life- stories (Shamir & Eilam, 2005) to further inform the servant leadership debate.We begin by describing the assumptions of logic, method, and theoretical lens directing our interpretive study. We then briefly review the current state of servant leadership theory, focusing on the recent theoretical framework proposed by van Dierendonck (2011). Next, we introduce Ping Fu and attempt to situate her leadership motives, attributes, and behaviors within van Dierendonck's (2011) conceptual model of servant leadership. Finally, noting the unique and incongruous aspects of Fu's servant leadership, we integrate insights gleaned from her case to illustrate the servant leader core emerging from her life-stories.Assumptions and ApproachAlthough studies of contemporary organizational leaders can be phenomenological, tending to favor realism over internal validity (Chatman & Flynn, 2005), Shamir and Eilam (2005) argued that the experiences chosen by a leader to appear in their life-stories reflects the leader's self-concepts, their concept of leadership, and the processes that enable their leadership practice. From this perspective, objectivity in the recounting of events is of lesser importance than the construction and interpretation of events (Neisser, 1994), as leaders select the elements of their stories. In doing so, they often ascribe meaning to prior events that may not have held significant meaning at the time of manifestation (Josselson, 1993). Thus, life-stories can be examined as "depositories of meaning" (Gabrial, 2000: 15) and "analyzed to discover those meanings" (Shamir & Eilam, 2005: 413). …