Notwithstanding the proliferation of servant leadership studies with over 100 articles published in the last four years alone, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its ...theory development. We provide an integrative and comprehensive review of the 285 articles on servant leadership spanning 20 years (1998–2018), and in so doing extend the field in four different ways. First, we provide a conceptual clarity of servant leadership vis-à-vis other value-based leadership approaches and offer a new definition of servant leadership. Second, we evaluate 16 existing measures of servant leadership in light of their respective rigor of scale construction and validation. Third, we map the theoretical and nomological network of servant leadership in relation to its antecedents, outcomes, moderators, mediators. We finally conclude by presenting a detailed future research agenda to bring the field forward encompassing both theoretical and empirical advancement. All in all, our review paints a holistic picture of where the literature has been and where it should go into the future.
Although the importance of team motivation has been increasingly emphasized, few studies have focused on prosocial motivation. Integrating theories on team effectiveness with prosocial motivation, we ...propose a theoretical model that links team prosocial motivation to team effectiveness as mediated by team processes. Team process is captured through the task-driven process of team cooperation and the affect-based team viability, and team effectiveness is operationalized as team performance, team organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and team voluntary turnover. The model is tested in Study 1, a field study with three-source data collected from 310 members of 67 work teams over four time periods, and Study 2, a laboratory experiment with 124 four-person teams in which team prosocial motivation is manipulated. In Studies 1 and 2, we find support for indirect effects of team prosocial motivation on team performance and team OCB through tbe mediating role of team cooperation. Team voluntary turnover is indirectly affected by team prosocial motivation through team viability. Furthermore, in both studies the indirect effects of team prosocial motivation on team performance and team OCB through team cooperation and on team voluntary turnover through team viability are stronger when the nature of the teams' work requires greater task interdependence.
In a sample of 961 employees working in 71 restaurants of a moderately sized restaurant chain, we investigated a key tenet of servant leadership theory—that servant leaders guide followers to emulate ...the leader's behavior by prioritizing the needs of others above their own. We developed and tested a model contending that servant leaders propagate servant leadership behaviors among followers by creating a serving culture, which directly influences unit (i.e., restaurant/store) performance and enhances individual attitudes and behaviors directly and through the mediating influence of individuals' identification with the unit. As hypothesized, serving culture was positively related both to restaurant performance and employee job performance, creativity, and customer service behaviors, and negatively related to turnover intentions, both directly and through employee identification with the restaurant. Samesource common method bias was reduced by employing five sources of data: employees, restaurant managers, customers, internal audits by headquarters staff, and external audits by a consulting firm.
Summary
Multisource data collected at three time phases were used in investigating when servant leadership elicits gratitude and then promotes prosocial behaviors. We tested a moderated mediation ...model, contending that relational attributions moderate the relationship between servant leadership and gratitude, and then gratitude sequentially predicts interpersonal citizenship behaviors and upward voice. As hypothesized, when employees do not highly rely on relational attributions for servant leadership, they feel more gratitude and subsequently engage in more interpersonal citizenship behaviors and upward voice than the employees who rely on relational attributions to explain their interactions with the leader. The sequential indirect effect from servant leadership to upward voice via gratitude and then interpersonal citizenship behaviors was significant when relational attributions are low rather than high.
Although research on servant leadership has been expanding over the past several years, a concise, valid scale for assessing global servant leadership has been lacking. In the current investigation a ...7-item measure of global servant leadership (SL-7), based on Liden, Wayne, Zhao, and Henderson's (2008) 28-item servant leadership measure (SL-28), is introduced. Psychometric properties of the SL-7 were assessed at the individual level with data collected from 729 undergraduate students, 218 graduate students, and 552 leader–follower dyads from 11 organizations, and at the team level with a study consisting of a total of 71 ongoing intact work teams. Results across three independent studies with six samples showed correlations between the SL-7 and SL-28 scales ranging from .78 to .97, internal consistency reliabilities over .80 in all samples, and significant criterion-related validities for the SL-7 that parallel those found with the SL-28.
Despite Lewin’s identification of the importance of context in behavioral research over 70 years ago, leadership psychology tended to ignore the context. Only in the past 10 years has context been ...more routinely included in psychological leadership research. We provide examples of leadership research that has explored the context, introduce the special issue articles, and provide suggestions for future research on the context of leadership.
Scholarly research on the topic of leadership has witnessed a dramatic increase over the last decade, resulting in the development of diverse leadership theories. To take stock of established and ...developing theories since the beginning of the new millennium, we conducted an extensive qualitative review of leadership theory across 10 top-tier academic publishing outlets that included The Leadership Quarterly, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Psychologist, Journal of Management, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organizational Science, and Personnel Psychology. We then combined two existing frameworks (Gardner, Lowe, Moss, Mahoney, & Cogliser, 2010; Lord & Dinh, 2012) to provide a process-oriented framework that emphasizes both forms of emergence and levels of analysis as a means to integrate diverse leadership theories. We then describe the implications of the findings for future leadership research and theory.
Drawing on social exchange theory, we developed and tested a cross-level model of organizational-level predictors of job engagement. Specifically, we examined the impact of high-performance human ...resource (HR) practices on employee engagement and work outcomes. Based on a sample of 605 employees, their immediate supervisors, and HR managers from 130 companies, our results indicated that high-performance HR practices were directly related to job engagement as well as indirectly related through employees’ perceived organizational support. In turn, job engagement was positively related to in-role performance and negatively related to intent to quit. Culture was found to act as a critical contextual factor, as our results also revealed that the relationship between HR practices and perceived organizational support was stronger when collectivism was high and when power distance orientation was low. Overall, the findings shed new light on the processes and conditions through which employee work-related outcomes are enhanced owing to high-performance HR practices.
Idiosyncratic deals ("i-deals") are special arrangements that individuals negotiate with their employers. This study investigates the link between i-deals and organizational citizenship behavior ...(OCB). From the perspective of social exchange theory, the relationship between individuals' i-deals and OCB should depend on the quality of workplace relationships with their supervisors, colleagues, and organization. Measuring these respectively as leader-member exchange (LMX), team-member exchange (TMX), and perceived organizational support (POS), we tested hypotheses via data gathered from 231 supervisor-subordinate dyads nested in 53 work groups. Results reveal stronger positive relations between i-deals and OCB for employees with low rather than high LMX or TMX.
One distinguishing feature of servant leadership is the proposition that servant leaders develop followers who also engage in serving behaviors. Drawing upon social learning theory, we argue that ...follower dispositional self-interest is a boundary condition affecting the transference of manager servant leadership to follower engagement in serving behaviors, and that follower serving self-efficacy is the underlying psychological mechanism. In a laboratory experiment (Study 1), we manipulated manager servant leadership and found support for the hypothesis that the positive relationship between manager servant leadership and follower serving behaviors is significantly enhanced for participants high in self-interest. The serving behaviors of participants low in self-interest was not affected by the degree to which the manager practiced servant leadership. In a field study (Study 2) with a sample representing 10 diverse organizations in Singapore, we replicated the findings. In another laboratory experiment (Study 3), we demonstrated that follower serving self-efficacy mediated the interactional effect found in the first two studies, supporting the social learning account for the transference of manager servant leadership to follower serving behaviors. Taken together, converging results from these three studies demonstrate that servant leaders are capable of bringing out serving behaviors especially among followers with a strong focus on their own self-interest. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
PDF
