Abstract
The SLAI measures the seven concepts found in Patterson’s (2003) theory of servant leadership. According to Patterson, the servant leader (a) leads and serves with love (Winston, 2002), (b) acts with humility (Sandage & Wiens, 2001), (c) is altruistic (Kaplan, 2000), (d) is visionary for the followers (Tangney, 2000), (e) is trusting (Hauser and House, 2000), (f) is serving (Wis, 2002), and (g) empowers followers (Covey, 2002). These are the seven constructs that comprise the servant leadership in Patterson’s model. Servant leadership as a theory emerged from Robert Greenleaf’s (1977) work. Recent investigations have expanded servant leadership to include identification and assessment servant leadership factors (Dennis & Bocarnea,2005; Dennis & Winston, 2003; Laub, 1999; Page & Wong, 2000; Patterson, 2003; Russell, 2000; Russell & Stone, 2002). The 42 items of the Servant Leadership Assessment Instrument (SLAI) cover a variety of attitudes and behaviors reflective of the aforementioned research. Reliability Research has indicated that the SLAI is internally consistent and reliable. Alpha reliability coefficients ranging from .89 to .92 have been reported (Dennis, 2004) for factors of love, empowerment, vision, and humility. Trust factor, however, has loaded with two items on two second data collections (Dennis, 2004) and one sample (Irving, 2005). The following alpha coefficients were found, measuring servant leadership at the individual leader level: (a) .92 for the SLAI love scale; (b) .92 for the SLAI empowerment scale; (c) .8637 for the SLAI vision scale; and (d) .92 for the SLAI humility scale. A Cronbach alpha coefficient could not be calculated for the SLAI trust scale because it only has two items in the scale (Irving, 2005).