A Late Boil-Water Notice and What Came After: Authentic and Servant Leadership at a Water Utility, Judged by How Followers Responded
Student Name
American College of Education
LEAD5653: Leadership Theories, Frameworks, and Philosophies
Module 4 Assignment
Instructor Name
July 24, 2028
The Episode
On a Saturday afternoon, a pressure drop in one zone of the composite water utility's distribution system raised the possibility of contamination. The utility's procedure allowed the operations director to issue a precautionary boil-water notice immediately or to wait for field pressure readings. The director chose to wait, and the readings, delayed by a failed data connection, took three hours. The notice went out at 7 p.m., about three hours after it should have. No illness was later reported, but the state drinking water program cited the utility for the delay, and a local news story questioned why residents had not been warned sooner.
Two leaders responded in different ways. The director addressed the failure directly. A field superintendent, whose crews had located the break, used the aftermath to change how the crews worked. Their responses offer a chance to test two leadership models that emphasize the leader's character and relationships, and to see how followers responded. The measure of a leadership model is not how a leader describes themselves but what followers do next.
Authentic Leadership and the Director
Walumbwa et al. (2008) defined authentic leadership through four components: self-awareness, understanding one's own strengths, weaknesses and effect on others; relational transparency, presenting one's genuine self and sharing information openly; balanced processing, objectively analyzing relevant information, including views that challenge one's own, before deciding; and an internalized moral perspective, acting on one's own values rather than on external pressure. Their research found that authentic leadership predicted followers' organizational citizenship behavior, commitment and satisfaction with their supervisor.
The director's response fits each component. At an all-staff meeting two days later, the director said the decision to wait had been the director's own, that the procedure had allowed it but that it had been the wrong call and that the director had underestimated how long the readings could take, an act of self-awareness and relational transparency. The director asked the operators who had been on duty what they would have done, and two said they would have issued the notice immediately; the director accepted that view and changed the procedure so that any pressure drop below a set threshold triggers an immediate notice without waiting, balanced processing in action. And the director made the same admission publicly in a statement to the news outlet, against the general manager's initial preference for a more guarded response, which reflects an internalized moral perspective.
Servant Leadership and the Superintendent
Eva et al. (2019), reviewing two decades of research, defined servant leadership as an other-oriented approach, shown through one-on-one prioritizing of followers' individual needs and interests and an outward reorientation of their concern toward others in the organization and the wider community. The field superintendent's response fits that definition. The crews who located the break had worked 14 hours. The superintendent sent them home, covered the overnight standby personally and the next week met each crew member individually to ask what had slowed them down. Their answers, including a failed radio, an outdated valve map and a rule that only supervisors could close large valves, became the superintendent's list. Within a month, radios were replaced, valve maps were updated from the crews' own notes and senior operators were authorized to close valves in an emergency.
The superintendent also turned the crews outward, arranging for two crew members to explain the event at a neighborhood association meeting. That combination, serving the crews' needs and pointing their work toward the community, is what distinguishes servant leadership from simple consideration.
The episode also shows a cost that servant leadership can hide. Covering the overnight standby after the crews' 14-hour day left the superintendent on duty for most of 30 hours, and for the next two weeks the one-on-one meetings came out of evenings rather than the working day. The definition from Eva et al. (2019) is built entirely around followers and the community, and it says nothing about the limits of the person doing the serving. A model that treats the leader's time as unlimited will eventually fail the followers it means to protect, so the superintendent's gains are more durable because the valve authority and the radio fix now live in procedure rather than in one person's stamina.
How Followers Responded
Follower response was measured three ways. First, near-miss and hazard reports, which employees file voluntarily, rose from 11 in the quarter before the event to 34 in the quarter after, and remained above 25 in the following quarter. A rise in voluntary reports after a leader admits a mistake is a meaningful signal: employees report problems when they believe the response will be to fix the system rather than to blame the reporter. Second, the utility's annual employee survey, conducted four months later, showed the share of field and operations staff agreeing that they could raise concerns without fear rising from 52 to 71 percent. Third, the superintendent's crews had the utility's lowest turnover that year, one departure among 22 employees.
The evidence is limited. The survey and reporting changes cannot be attributed to one event, and other changes, including the new procedure itself, may have encouraged reporting. But the direction and size of the changes are consistent with what both models predict: leaders who are open about their own mistakes and who put followers' needs first earn trust, and trust shows up as voice.
Do These Models Add Anything?
A skeptic could ask whether authentic and servant leadership are simply new names for transformational leadership, which Module 3 examined. Hoch et al. (2018), in a meta-analysis comparing these models with transformational leadership, found that authentic and ethical leadership were so highly correlated with transformational leadership that they added little explanatory power for most outcomes, while servant leadership explained meaningful variance beyond transformational leadership and showed promise as a distinct approach.
The episode is consistent with that finding. The director's admission could be described as idealized influence in transformational terms, and it is not obvious that the authentic label adds much. The superintendent's behavior is harder to describe in transformational terms: it involved no vision or inspirational appeal, only attention to each person's needs and a turn toward the community. That is the distinctive contribution of servant leadership, and in this episode it produced the most concrete changes.
Conclusion
Judged by what followers did rather than by what either leader said, the late notice left the utility stronger than it found it. Voluntary reports tripled, the share of staff who felt safe raising a concern rose by nineteen points and the crews who had done the hardest work stayed. Authentic leadership describes the director's admission well, but the evidence suggests it adds little that the transformational account from Module 3 could not already explain. Servant leadership describes something the earlier models did not capture: a leader whose plan was the list the followers wrote. For the rest of this course, the practical lesson is that a leader's response to a mistake is itself a leadership act, and followers read it more closely than any vision statement.
References
Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004
Hoch, J. E., Bommer, W. H., Dulebohn, J. H., & Wu, D. (2018). Do ethical, authentic, and servant leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), 501-529. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316665461
Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308913
How this LEAD 5653 Module 4 example is structured
LEAD 5653 Module 4 often turns to servant and authentic models, and to how followers respond; your classroom's instructions decide the episode and the evidence of follower response. This example describes the episode, then applies each model to one leader using its published components. Because the brief emphasizes followers, the analysis measures follower response with observable behavior as well as opinion, and a final section asks whether these newer models add anything to the transformational framework from Module 3.
LEAD5653 Module 4 questions, answered
What does LEAD5653 Module 4 usually ask for?
LEAD5653 Module 4 often asks students to apply servant and authentic leadership models and to examine how followers respond to leaders who use them. Many sections expect the models' components to be identified in a real or case episode. Your classroom's instructions decide the episode and evidence required.
What are the components of authentic leadership?
A widely used definition includes self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing of information and an internalized moral perspective. Research links these to follower commitment, satisfaction and helpful behavior.
How is servant leadership different from transformational leadership?
Servant leadership centers on meeting followers' individual needs and directing concern outward to the community, while transformational leadership centers on inspiring followers toward a vision. Meta-analytic research suggests servant leadership explains outcomes beyond what transformational leadership does.
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