Servant and Transformational Followership as a Consumptive Experience Servant Leadership Research Roundtable-August 2005

Bruce Winston
unpublished
This conceptual article combines consumer behavior and leader-follower literature to present the notion of leader-follower interaction as a consumptive experience for the follower. The concept contends that leaders should consider the consumer decision process of affection, cognition, and conation and further, that leaders should intentionally frame, script, stage, and perform for and with the follower in a manner that creates a pleasant consumptive experience for the follower. The article
more » ... s that the idea of leader-follower interaction as a consumptive experience may lead to a better understanding of followers affective, normative, and continuance commitment to the leader and/or the organization. This conceptual study examines the follower's receipt of the leader's behavior as a consumptive experience for the follower and brings together elements of marketing's consumer behavior theory with the servant leadership theory/models of Patterson (2003) and Winston (2003) as well as the transformational theory/model of Bass and Avolio (1994). No research at present has examined the role of the leader providing service to the follower as seen through the consumptive view of the follower. The purpose of this study is to lay the groundwork for future theory building research in the area of follower-leader interaction. Patterson (2003), in her model of the servant leader-follower interaction, as well as Winston (2003) in his model of the servant follower-leader interaction, shows the effect of service (leaders' and followers' respectively) on the others' agapao love (moral love or friendship/respect valuation for the other). Bass and Avolio (1994) present the four I's of transformational leadership (intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence) as behavior from the leader to the follower in which Bass and Avolio present the behaviors from the perspective of the leader but not from the perspective of the follower. The premise of this conceptual study is that the followers may gain as much or more from the process of receiving the leaders' behavior as they gain from the end results. The value of this conceptual approach is to show that there may be more value in studying the process of how leaders 'lead' through service rather than in just looking at the motivational outcomes of the follower. To present this concept, this paper first looks at the notion of a consumptive experience and how the consumer may gain value from the experience rather than just the end result or utility of the service. The paper then presents sections examining the affective process of the follower receiving service from the leader. Consumptive Experience A consumptive experience is any process in which a customer receives a service from a provider in which the customer plays a willing role in the receipt of the service. For example when a customer receives a
fatcat:4ogredchljap3nvh3sahco5z2a