GM503 Unit 7 School Bus Servant Leadership Paper Example

Nine Percent Saved, and for Whom: A Unit 7 Servant Leadership Application to a School Transportation Director

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM503: Leadership Theory and Practice II

Unit 7 Servant Leadership Application

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[Date]

The school district, its transportation department, the director and every figure are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and studies cited are real.

The Record

The district serves about 24,000 students across a mix of suburban neighborhoods and rural areas, with a fleet of 210 buses and about 230 drivers. Its transportation director, Gary Pruitt, arrived three years ago facing rising fuel and labor costs and a driver shortage. Over two years he consolidated routes from 198 to 176, introduced routing software that redrew every route each summer and renegotiated the fuel contract. Annual transportation costs fell 9 percent, about $2.1 million. The school board praised him publicly, and the superintendent nominated him for a state award.

Three Leadership Lenses

A transformational reading would emphasize Pruitt's vision of an efficient, modern operation, his energy in promoting the software and his success in getting the board and principals to accept route changes. Transformational leaders focus on the organization's objectives and inspire followers to commit to them.

Servant leadership asks different questions. Robert Greenleaf proposed its central test: do those served grow as persons, becoming healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and more likely themselves to become servants, and what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or at least not be further deprived (Greenleaf, 1970)? Robert Liden and colleagues later identified seven dimensions of servant leadership, among them helping people recover from setbacks, developing their abilities, giving their interests priority and producing benefits for the wider community (Liden et al., 2008).

Gregory Stone, Robert Russell and Kathleen Patterson argued that the difference between the two approaches lies in the leader's focus. Transformational leaders focus on the organization and see follower development as a means to organizational goals; servant leaders focus on followers and see organizational goals as the outcome of serving them (Stone et al., 2004). Applied to Pruitt, the question is not whether he achieved results but whom his decisions served first.

Applying Greenleaf's Test to the Drivers

The district's drivers are the people Pruitt most directly leads. The record here is mixed. On the positive side, he raised starting pay to address the shortage and ended a practice of assigning new drivers the hardest routes without training. Driver vacancies fell from 31 to 9.

On the negative side, the routing software increased the number of split shifts, in which drivers work a morning run, go unpaid for several hours and return for an afternoon run, from about 40 percent of drivers to about 65 percent. Because routes are redrawn every summer, many drivers lost the routes they had driven for years, along with relationships with the families and students on them. In a survey the union conducted, 58 percent of drivers said they had less control over their work than before the software. Greenleaf's test asks whether those served become freer and more autonomous. For many drivers, the answer is no.

Applying Greenleaf's Test to the Least Privileged

Greenleaf's second question looks beyond the leader's own staff. The students with the longest rides are in the district's rural areas, which are also its poorest, and students with disabilities who ride specialized buses to programs at a few schools. Route consolidation lengthened average ride times for rural students from 38 to 51 minutes each way. For students on specialized routes, average rides grew from 44 to 57 minutes. Suburban ride times barely changed.

The savings were real, but the longest new rides went to the district's poorest students and its students with disabilities, the group Greenleaf's test asks a leader to protect first.

How the Director Explains His Choices

In an interview, Pruitt said he had known ride times would rise in the rural areas and believed it was the unavoidable cost of serving a spread-out district with fewer buses. He pointed out that the board had set a savings target and that route consolidation was the only way to reach it without cutting driver pay. On split shifts, he said the software had found the most efficient pattern and that he had not considered asking drivers to review routes, because "they would all want to keep their old ones." His account is coherent, and it illustrates Stone and colleagues' distinction exactly. Every reason he gave starts from the organization's targets and works outward to the people affected. None starts from the drivers or the riders and works back to the target.

A Split Verdict

Measured against Liden and colleagues' dimensions, Pruitt shows some servant behaviors: he helped new drivers succeed with training and raised pay to reduce the shortage. But he did not put drivers first in the design of routes, and the community value created by the savings was distributed unevenly, with costs falling on the students least able to absorb them.

The transformational reading would score Pruitt highly on vision, influence and results. The servant reading credits his attention to new drivers and his pay increase, but finds that his main decisions served the organization's efficiency before the people most affected. Stone and colleagues' distinction explains the gap: his focus was the organization, and the drivers and students were affected by, rather than served by, his choices.

What a Servant-Led Version Might Have Looked Like

A servant-led approach would not necessarily have produced smaller savings. It might have set constraints before running the routing software: no rural or specialized ride longer than 45 minutes, and no driver moved off a route held for more than three years without consultation. It might have asked drivers to review proposed routes before they were finalized, as they know the roads, the stops and the students. Savings might have been smaller, perhaps 6 or 7 percent, but distributed differently.

Limits of the Analysis

The servant leadership test relies on judgments about growth and autonomy that are hard to measure. The driver survey was conducted by the union during contract negotiations, which may have shaped responses. Ride times are averages and may hide variation. And the district's board, not Pruitt alone, approved the route consolidation and set the savings target.

Conclusion

By most measures, the transportation director succeeded. Servant leadership adds two questions the other lenses do not ask: did the people he led become freer and more capable, and what happened to the least privileged? The answers are mixed for drivers and unfavorable for rural students and students with disabilities, whose rides lengthened most. The verdict is split: Pruitt led well toward the organization's goals and less well toward the people his decisions affected most.

References

Greenleaf, R. K. (1970). The servant as leader. The Robert K. Greenleaf Center.

Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(2), 161-177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.01.006

Stone, A. G., Russell, R. F., & Patterson, K. (2004). Transformational versus servant leadership: A difference in leader focus. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 25(4), 349-361. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730410538671