Browsing by Subject "church administration"

This research aims to to explore servant leadership (SL) in the dioceses of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF). The aim will be addressed by exploring these two research questions: 1. Which categories of servant leadership are the strongest amongst supervisors’, and which are the weakest? 2. What are the possible antecedents for the supervisors’ servant-leader behavior? The data used in this quantitative study has been collected as part of the Exponential Work -project, which is a part of Future of Work -research, a Finnish Academy-funded research program. The data used in this study consists of 650 parish work personnel who evaluated their immediate supervisor’s SL. Over 400 leader-follower dyads were formed based on the information given by these participants. Based on the findings of this study, supervisors emphasize first and foremost behaving ethically. The category, which was the second strongest, was having a sense of purpose. The two categories where church leadership struggled most were helping followers grow and succeed and creating value for those outside of the organization. Except for behaving ethically, every category of Ehrhart’s SL had quite a bit of variance in them. The church also provided an interesting context for Ehrhart’s measure. The measure could be used as two-dimensional instead of one. Compared to a small sample of previous studies with Ehrhart’s measure, the level of servant leader behavior is quite average in the ELCF. As for the antecedents for SL, the most basic comparison of male and female supervisors did not find significant differences between the genders. The means of dioceses differed more than those of male and female supervisors, but the differences were not statistically significant. The first significant differences between supervisors were found when examining differences between organizational levels; SL got better the higher the organizational level of the supervisor was. Differences were also found when examining the age and work experience of supervisors. On average, SL improves until the age of circa 49, after which it declines. The trend was somewhat similar with regards to supervisors’ work experience. On average, the first twenty or so years have a positive trend, followed by a decline. The study ended with comparing supervisors according to the years they had been in their current position. The findings of this process were that, first, supervisors could enjoy a “honeymoon” period when they begin in a new position. Secondly, the number of years spent in the same position seems to affect male and female supervisors differently. Unlike their female colleagues, with male supervisors, the number of years spent in the same position negatively correlated with their SL.