Exploring the Influence of Servant Leadership and Job Engagement on Affective Commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Agricultural Sector

Abstract

The agricultural sector is currently facing an era of disruption amidst the industrial revolution which ultimately forces human resources to adapt, including agricultural human resources. Researchers have highlighted the role of servant leadership and job engagement on affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. This research aims to analyze the improvement in the performance of government officials in agricultural development (food crops, horticulture, and fisheries) through the arrangement of human resources, namely, Civil Servants allocated to servant leadership roles and job engagement in affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. According to the gap theory they are placing job engagement as a mediator in conditioning servant leadership on affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Causal design with a positivism (quantitative) paradigm to test the proposed hypothesis. Involving around 118 Civil Servants in regional organizations of the Agriculture Service, Food Crops and Horticulture Service, and South Konawe Regency Fisheries Service. The research was conducted for five months, between May and September 2023. Starting from distributing questionnaires to compiling research results. This number is determined randomly proportionally. Data was obtained by distributing questionnaires, using a Likert scale. Data were analyzed with the help of SEM using AMOS 7 software. Servant leadership is proven to play a significant role in job engagement, affective commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Then job engagement hurts affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Job engagement acts as a mediator between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior. This finding is in line with the performance achievements of the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sectors which show an increase in their respective contributions to the regional economy in 2018 from IDR 2,103 billion to IDR 2,435 billion in 2022. Theoretically, government organizations in implementing job engagement are so weak that they are unable to create affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. Based on these findings, it is necessary to strengthen the implementation of job engagement, and to prove this model, it is necessary to carry out further analysis on a wider scale and with a diversity of sample characteristics. The practical implication is that increasing the achievements of this sector in the future can be done by maximizing job engagement, affective commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, and servant leadership. The resulting novelty is the mediating role of job engagement on the influence of servant leadership on affective commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior, achievements in the agricultural, forestry, and fisheries sectors.