Servant leadership attributes of the mosques in Sri Lanka -An empirical analysis

Abstract

The mosque is prime institution to accomplish its articulated mission as a community development center to play leadership role in shaping Muslim life by its multi-functional and complex role at once of religion, social, education, culture, and politics in'its community. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the leadership attributes of the mosque in Sri Lanka based on servant leadership factors and examine the implication of these attributes for the mosque involvement in the community works and their management practices. This study used the statically analysis of data obtained through questionnaire and survey administered among the randomly selected mosques and their Jamaat'members. The findings illustrate that the mosques admitted to exhibit eight factors of servant leadership attributes in the meantime their jamaat members perceived of that the mosques overestimate as they exhibit all these attributes. The difference between the mosques functional attributes of servant leadership as admitted by mosques and the observation of the jamaat members on these attributes was statistically significant. Furthermore, there is no significant correlation of the mosques’ performance in spiritual development of the community and financial health to the servan'tleadership factors except the first factor, vision. Nevertheless, the level of mosques involvement in community development works significantly related to each factor of the servant leadership attributes of the mosque.