Abstract
In response to the severe lack of leadership assessment tools in the Chinese context, the Service Leadership Behavior Scale was developed based on the Service Leadership Model proposed by Po Chung, the co-founder of DHL International. Utilizing responses from 4,486 Hong Kong undergraduates, this paper reports the findings of a validation study on the Short-Form Service Leadership Behavior Scale (SLB-SF-65). Previous findings based on exploratory factor analysis supported a six-factor 48-item solution (SLB-SF-48). With the removal of ten items, confirmatory factor analysis showed that the final 38-item scale (SLB-SF-38) possessed excellent internal consistency, concurrent validity, and factorial validity based on multigroup invariance analyses. Overall speaking, the present study underscores the utility of the SLB-SF-38 as an objective assessment instrument of service leadership behavior in the education, research and personnel training contexts.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, a structural transformation from the manufacturing-based to servicefocused economies has been observed in many developed as well as developing countries (Bryson and Daniels, 2015; Snell et al, 2017)
The present paper primarily reports the findings of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed on the subset B (N = 2,240), internal consistency, convergent and factorial validity of the final version of the Service Leadership Behavior Scale (SLB-SF-38)
Factor Structure of the Initial Model: SLB-SF-48 Based on the original exploratory factor analysis (EFA) solution, the findings revealed that the initial model (SLB-SF-48) fit the data reasonably well (RMSEA = 0.061; SRMR = 0.046), some indices (CFI = 0.86; Non-Normed fit index (NNFI) = 0.86) fell short of the recommended levels (Aquino and Reed, 2002)
Summary
Over the past few decades, a structural transformation from the manufacturing-based to servicefocused economies has been observed in many developed as well as developing countries (Bryson and Daniels, 2015; Snell et al, 2017). As such, possessing effective leadership qualities in this service era is indispensable in the contemporary world (Chung, 2015; Chung and Elfassy, 2016). This service-focused leadership has been widely discussed in literature on both public and commercial service units. According to Schneider et al (2005), leader’s service-focused behavior, or service leadership, communicates a commitment to high levels of service quality. It is argued that service-oriented management and effective service leadership foster a service climate and improve service performance (Jiang et al, 2015). Some assessment tools on service leadership have been developed and adopted in related empirical studies (Schneider et al, 2005; Jiang et al, 2015), such as Service Climate Scale (includes items measuring service-oriented leadership behavior) developed by Schneider et al (1998), and a managerial measure of organizational service-orientation developed by Lytle et al (1998), where service leadership was conceptualized as a combination of servant leadership and service orientation
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