Does Proactive Personality Moderate the Relationship Between Servant Leadership and Psychological Ownership and Resilience?

PurposeThis paper develops and tests a model for managing workplace bullying by integrating employee perceived servant leadership, resilience and proactive personality. Specifically, this paper explores servant leadership as an inhibitive factor for workplace bullying, both directly and indirectly in the presence of employee resilience as a mediator. It further explores whether proactive personality moderates the indirect relationship.Design/methodology/approachThis is an empirical study based on analysis of survey data collected from 408 employees working in services and manufacturing sector organisations in Pakistan. Structural equation modelling was used to test the research model.FindingsStructural equation modelling results support the proposition that servant leadership helps in discouraging workplace bullying, both directly and indirectly, in the presence of employee resilience as a mediator. However, employee proactive personality moderates this process, such that the association between resilience and workplace bullying is stronger for individuals with high proactive personality.Research limitations/implicationsThis study's findings illuminate the strong potential of servant leadership for managing workplace bullying. This potential is attributed to positive role modelling in the workplace, which may assist in building followers' resilience. This study provides evidence to support the importance of leadership in the process by which employees develop better psychological resources to combat bullying at work.Originality/valueThis is the first study that examines the direct relationship between servant leadership and bullying at work. In addition, this study introduced the mediating effect of resilience and the moderating effect of proactive personality on this relationship.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to explore the effects of customers’ psychological ownership of shared products on customer citizenship behaviour in the sharing economy. This study hypothesizes that customer-company identification can increase consumers’ psychological ownership of shared products in the absence of legal ownership, thereby promoting customer citizenship behaviour. This study asserts that psychological ownership plays a mediating role in the relationship between customer-company identification and customer citizenship behaviour based on social identity theory. We explore the moderating role of consumers’ proactive personalities in the sharing economy. METHODS: A questionnaire including the following was constructed: customer-company identification, psychological ownership, customer citizenship behaviour, and proactive personality. We administered the online consumer questionnaire in China to investigate the factors that affect consumer behavioural intentions in the sharing economy. RESULTS: First, based on a sample of 326 participants, the results suggest that both customer-company identification and psychological ownership are positively related to customer citizenship behaviour. Second, psychological ownership partially mediates the relationship between customer-company identification and customer citizenship behaviour. Third, proactive personality moderates the relationship between customer-company identification and customer citizenship behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the importance of psychological ownership in promoting customer citizenship behaviour in the sharing economy.

PurposeThis paper aims to report the findings of a study examining the relationship between different leadership styles and engagement through the mediating role of proactive personality.Design/methodology/approachServant leadership, paradoxical leadership, authentic leadership, employee engagement and proactive personality were assessed in an empirical study based on a sample of 348 military personnel in Spain. The questionnaire data were analyzed through SEM using EQS and bootstrapping analysis using the PROCESS macro for SPSS.FindingsThe results reveal that servant leadership style in officers partially impacts their cadets' engagement through proactive personality but that authentic and paradoxical leadership styles do not mediate the relationship. The authors also verify a direct relationship between proactive personality and engagement.Practical implicationsThe study implications advance the literature on leadership in emphasizing new leadership styles to increase proactive personality and engagement in the military context. This study verifies the importance of military leaders fostering servant leadership as an antecedent of proactive personality. Finally, the authors show that servant leadership partially impacts engagement through proactive personality.Originality/valueThis study explores the relationship among servant, paradoxical and authentic leadership styles, proactive personality, and engagement – relationships that have not been explored theoretically and tested empirically in the military context.

This study presents a model for the impact of servant leadership on work engagement of staff in academic settings. Moreover, the paper introduces intrinsic motivation, psychological ownership, and person-job fit as intervening mechanisms between servant leadership and work engagement. Our data were gathered from academic staff working in twelve Palestinian universities. We used partial least squares SEM to investigate the hypotheses. Results indicate that the link between servant leadership and academics’ work engagement is not straightforward. Intrinsic motivation, psychological ownership, and person-job fit of academic staff had a full mediating effect among the examined variables. The paper provides evidence that servant leadership is a promising style for higher education. Moreover, the paper offers important implications for administrators and policymakers in higher education about the role of servant leadership in promoting academics’ work engagement.

PurposeThe main concern of this research is to examine the indirect effects servant leadership on organisational sustainability (OS) through creativity and psychological resilience in the hoteling sector in Malaysia.Design/methodology/approach A survey method based on a questionnaire was employed to gather data from 441 employees working in the hotel industry in Malaysia. The partial least squares technique, SmartPLS3.3.7, was employed to examine the hypotheses.Findings The result of the study found support for effect of servant leadership on creativity and psychological resilience. In addition, the effect of creativity and psychological resilience on OS was supported. Moreover, the mediation role of creativity and psychological resilience between servant leadership and organisational suitability was also supported by data.Originality/value This is a pioneering study that has combined human capital elements (i.e. servant leadership, creativity and psychological resilience) to examine their impacts on OS. Besides, this work has established comparatively new relationships, i.e. the impact of servant leadership on OS through the mediating role of creativity and psychological resilience. In addition, this study has developed relatively new link between psychological resilience and OS. In addition, it has confirmed the validity and reliability of servant leadership and OS at first and second orders.

PurposeBuilding on social exchange theory, this study aims to propose a research model to examine the relationship between servant leadership (SL) and employee affective commitment (AC) where psychological ownership (PO) and person–organization fit are theorized to play a mediating role.Design/methodology/approachThe study used quantitative research methods with a deductive approach to examine the proposed relationships and the underlying mechanisms. Data were collected from 346 employees working at higher education sector in Palestine. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.FindingsThe results reveal a significant mediating role of PO and person – organization (P-O) fit in explaining the relationship between SL and employee AC. Results indicate that the service orientation and humble attitude of servant leaders toward employees help employees develop a sense of ownership, leading to a better fit with organizational values and thus to a more committed workforce.Practical implicationsThe results of this study may be useful for managers working in higher education in a non-Western context who are considering using SL behaviors to improve outcomes.Originality/valueThe study advances SL research currently in its early stages (Zhanget al., 2019). Moreover, it increases understanding of the mediating roles played by PO and P-O fit.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediation effects of psychological ownership on the relationship between servant leadership and customer orientation in first-grade hotel restaurants in Seoul. To address these issues, 330 questionnaires were distributed to employees at first-grade hotels located in Seoul, with 307 used for reliability and factor analyses with SPSS 18.0. The results of the study show that servant leadership (conceptualization and trust) positively affected psychological ownership. Secondly, psychological ownership positively affected customer orientation. Thirdly, psychological ownership positively affected customer orientation. Lastly, it was revealed that psychological ownership partially mediated the interrelationship between servant leadership and customer orientation. This study provides implications pertaining to the development of efficient human resource management strategies for hotel restaurants from academic and practical perspectives.

One of the most significant challenges facing leaders today is the need to position and enable organisations and people to adapt to an increasingly dynamic and demanding environment. This study examined and analysed the role of servant leadership in affective commitment to change in the higher education sector using a sequential mediation model of conscientiousness personality and psychological ownership. The data were collected online from 293 Indonesian lecturers. Data analysis was performed using a structural equation model using SmartPLS software. The results confirmed that implementing servant leadership encourages positive values in social learning principles in higher education, which can improve conscientiousness and psychological ownership. Conscientiousness and psychological ownership support social learning, according to the principle of servant leadership, to encourage a robust affective commitment to change in a higher education environment. Conscientiousness and psychological ownership are sequential mediators that influence affective commitment to change. This study is unique in that it highlights the conscious personality factor and psychological aspects as sequential mediation on the relationship between servant leadership and affective commitment to change in the higher education sector, as well as the fact that although all hypotheses are supported, this sequential mediation mechanism is the first such study.

This research aimed to explore how servant leadership nurtures nurses' job embeddedness by uncovering the sequential mediation of psychological contract fulfillment and psychological ownership. The healthcare of Pakistan is undergoing an acute shortage of 1.3 million nurses. The gap is widening due to unprecedented natural uncertainties (floods, earthquakes, COVID-19, dengue, polio, and monkeypox) and the large-scale brain drain of nurses. Therefore, exploring the underlying factors that could facilitate nurses' job embeddedness is imperative. A cross-sectional research design was employed, wherein data were gathered in three rounds, two months apart, from 587 nurses employed in public hospitals in Pakistan, and analysis was performed with Smart-PLS. Servant leadership positively influences nurses' job embeddedness and psychological contract fulfillment. Besides, psychological contract fulfillment positively affects psychological ownership, and psychological ownership enhances nurses' job embeddedness. Finally, psychological contract fulfillment and psychological ownership sequentially mediate the relationship between servant leadership and job embeddedness. This research emphasized the vitality of servant leadership in nurturing nurses' job embeddedness. Implications for Nursing Management. Healthcare authorities should keenly focus on promoting servant leadership that shapes the positive perception of nurses about their psychological contract fulfillment and psychological ownership, which are essential resources to cherish nurses' job embeddedness.

PurposeA worker with a proactive personality actively pursues changes in the environment instead of maintaining the status quo, leading to an expected result of a negative relationship between proactive personality and psychological withdrawal behaviors. The authors propose that based on the trait activation theory (TAT), this negative relationship is moderated by servant leadership.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical data collected from subway station workers in three metropolitan cities in South Korea supported all the hypothesized relationships. Even though the workers are not public servants, the subway companies are owned by three metropolitan cities. With reliability and validity tests for the measurements, the authors performed an ordinary least square (OLS) hierarchical multiple regression analysis for hypotheses testing.FindingsA multilevel analysis showed that the higher a worker's proactive personality is, the less likely it is that he/she shows withdrawal behaviors at work and that the negative relationship between the two is stronger under servant leadership. An organization pursuing maximization of its members' proactive personality may find an advantage in servant leadership.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, the data was collected from three metropolitan city-owned companies, which may have different work attitudes and behaviors. Second, the authors hypothesized and found a negative relationship between the predictor and the dependent variable. To apply TAT more appropriately, the dependent variable could have been a positive work behavior showing a positive relationship between the predictor and the dependent variable.Originality/valueThe results of this study have both theoretical and empirical implications. In terms of theoretical implication, the study rather indirectly supports TAT. While Greenbaum et al. (2017) demonstrated the triggering effect of abusive supervision on employees' Machiavellianism, which leads to unethical behaviors, this study showed a stronger negative relationship between proactive personality and psychological withdrawal behaviors. This study provided empirical evidence showing servant leadership's role in lowering negative behaviors. This study's findings suggest how an organization could maximize the benefits of members' proactive personality under high servant leadership.

Authored by a practicing CEO, this paper explores—and broadly calls for—a strategic approach to expand servanthood and servant leadership (SL) practice through focused scholarship by examining distinctive qualities and phenomena observed in the field. In order to move SL practice forward, scholars are urged to not only address conventional social science needs, but also practical implementation needs which limit SL’s establishment in practice. I first provide a broad strategic plan with three goals and a framework to approach SL’s strategic distinctions and competitive advantages (the main focus of this paper) consisting of four qualities— servant first, stakeholder focus, first-among-equals (or primus inter pares in Latin), and ethical basis —that differentiate SL among leadership styles. I then identify four key, but under-researched, psychological phenomena which I have observed in the field: individual-level phronesis (practical wisdom), psychological ownership , and joy , as well as group-level interdependence which are proposed as both proximal outcomes of the identified SL strategic distinctions and as distal antecedents to SL in reciprocal deterministic fashion. The nomological net resultant from this theorizing shows that all four psychological constructs have the possibility to enhance and extend the self-determination theory model of SL emergence—adding to SL theory in general and, more specifically, potentially attracting practitioners to consider SL adoption. The paper concludes with a graphical summary of how strategic SL distinctions cause and are caused by a virtuous cycle of servanthood emergence, and highlights SL’s parsimonious alignment with evolved morality to foster collaboration and collective action.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of servant leadership on employees' promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior by focusing on the mediating role of job engagement and the moderating role of proactive personality.Design/methodology/approachTime-lagged data were collected using a field survey research design. The participants included 216 employees and 23 supervisors in two commercial banks in China.FindingsPerceived servant leadership was positively related to employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior, and these relationships were mediated by enhanced job engagement. In addition, employees' proactive personality amplified the relationship between perceived servant leadership and job engagement, and the mediating effect of job engagement on the relationship between perceived servant leadership and voice behavior.Research limitations/implicationsThis study enhances understanding of the mechanisms underlying the servant leadership – voice model by identifying the mediating role of job engagement. The results also demonstrate the moderating role of proactive personality in enhancing the effects of servant leadership. However, the survey design was not longitudinal, which limits the study's ability to confirm causality.Practical implicationsThe findings reveal that servant leadership, employees' job engagement, and proactive personality can facilitate employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior.Originality/valueThis study addresses the unexplored mediating mechanism of the relationship between servant leadership and voice behavior, and offers new directions for servant leadership and voice research.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of servant leadership on followers’ subjective career success and the mediating role of career skills. The moderating effect of followers’ proactive personality is also investigated.Design/methodology/approachThis paper collected two-wave matched data from 283 employees of an IT company. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.FindingsServant leadership has a positive effect on career satisfaction and perceived employability through career skills. In addition, proactive personality moderates the association between servant leadership and career skills, such that the relationship is stronger when proactive personality is high. Proactive personality also moderates the indirect effect of servant leadership on career satisfaction and perceived employability.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that organizations should select and train leaders to practice servant leadership to enhance employee subjective career success.Originality/valueThis is the first study to investigate the mechanism and boundary conditions of the association between servant leadership and employee subjective career success.

The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of servant leadership on teachers of moral education degree programs in Pakistan. By utilizing social learning, we propose that servant leadership and perceived coworker support can reduce the knowledge hiding by enhancing the sense of organization-based psychological ownership. The findings of time-lagged and multi-source data indicate that servant leadership has a negative relationship with knowledge hiding. Our results also indicate that psychological ownership mediates the effects of servant leadership on knowledge hiding. Moreover, a higher level of perceived coworker support enhances the sense of psychological ownership which helps to reduce knowledge hiding. This research extends strong support for the proposition that servant leaders who adopt an employee-centered management approach, stressing personal integrity and care for employees significantly affect employee attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, this study suggests that managers should demonstrate care toward their subordinates which helps them to reduce negative behaviors (e.g., knowledge hiding).

The purpose of the study is to examines the role of psychological resilience as a mediator in the relationship between servant leadership, work engagement, and academic performance, utilizing the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework in higher education. This study employed a survey technique with a sample of 475 randomly selected lecturers—multivariate analysis using SEM analysis with the maximum likelihood estimation method. The findings underscore the significant positive impact of servant leadership servant leadership exerts a significant positive influence on psychological resilience (β = 0.268, p < 0.05), which, in turn, enhances work engagement (β = 0.345, p < 0.05) and performance (β = 0.090, p < 0.05). Furthermore, work engagement mediates the relationship between servant leadership and performance (indirect effect = 0.134, p < 0.05). Psychological resilience mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement (indirect effect = 0.055, p < 0.05). work engagement mediates the relationship between psychological resilience and performance (indirect effect = 0.169, p < 0.05). The model demonstrated a good fit (CFI = 0.96, TLI = 0.95, RMSEA = 0.034), validating the robustness of the proposed framework. Leaders who prioritize service-oriented leadership and demonstrate responsiveness to subordinates' psychological needs cultivate a resilient workforce, thereby fostering higher levels of engagement and organizational commitment. Furthermore, the study establishes work engagement as a mediating variable in the relationship between servant leadership and performance. These findings offer critical implications for higher education institutions, suggesting that adopting a servant leadership approach can serve as a strategic mechanism for enhancing faculty engagement, resilience, and overall performance. in higher education.