Enhancing Performance: An Analysis of Starbucks and Servant Leadership

The concept of leadership is perhaps the most overused word, which has been harnessed with so many conceptual meanings, stakes, and implications. In various scientific articles, it has been understood as a structural characteristic of the personality, while many times it has been linked to the organizational conditions of the organization. Often, it has been approached as a behavioral characteristic. Given the proven research value of the concept of leadership, a deeper understanding of the nature of leadership can be extremely important.

Leadership has been understood as a process of exercising social influence in an organization or group. In the same context, a leading individual (leader) will tend to initiate invisible and overt processes, where other individuals may be supported in starting and completing tasks. Servant leadership refers to the leader who can understand and manage the anxieties/thoughts of the followers deeply and who can shape them into a course, where he can take the overall responsibility for success/failure. A leader does not simply plan on the safe side but leads by taking a significant, ongoing risk—of achieving overall goals or approaching total failure. This study aims to understand the significant role of servant leadership through using the case study of Starbucks. Starbucks Corporation is a multinational coffee chain based in Seattle, United States. Howard Schultz was hired in 1982 to manage the company's retail sales and marketing. His departure from the initial Starbucks company due to a few challenges, was so amicable that the founders subsequently invested in his vision and his research purposes. Schultz's leadership style at Starbucks has been admired and studied here. Schultz is one of the rare examples of a successful implementation of the servant philosophy of leadership. Servant leadership can be an extremely important leadership philosophy to match the complex conditions of the modern environment. This was explored in the current paper, through the analysis of the global success of the Starbucks café chain.