How Servant Leadership Sparks Feedback-Seeking Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model.

Dong Qin,Yan Xu,Xue Meng,Chaoping Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.748751

Abstract

Drawing upon social information processing theory, we propose that moqi with supervisors mediates the relationship between servant leadership and follower feedback-seeking behavior. Subordinates’ traditionality plays a moderating role in this process. A total of 440 Chinese working adults responded to the two-wave questionnaire survey in paper and pencil forms. Correlation analyses, mediation analysis, and moderated mediation analysis was performed through R and SPSS PROCESS Macro. The results revealed that servant leadership positively correlates with followers’ feedback-seeking behavior via moqi with supervisors. Moreover, these indirect effects of servant leadership were moderated by traditionality, such that servant leadership had weaker relations with feedback-seeking behavior when traditionality was higher (vs. lower). Theoretical contributions and practical implications, limitations and suggestions for further study were discussed.

Highlights

As labor market conditions rapidly change with the development of the economy and society, both organizational environment and requirements for employees are increasingly complex in the workplace
Based on social information processing theory (SIPT, Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978) and the feedback-seeking behavior literature, we provide a social information processing model to explain the positive association between servant leadership and feedback-seeking behavior
We found that servant leadership was positively related to moqi with supervisors and in turn positively related to feedbackseeking behavior

Summary

Introduction

As labor market conditions rapidly change with the development of the economy and society, both organizational environment and requirements for employees are increasingly complex in the workplace. Given the valuable information gathered through feedback-seeking contributes to employees’ development and improvement, it is important to investigate its antecedents trying to identify ways to encourage it (e.g., Qian et al, 2017; Sherf and Morrison, 2020). Researchers have found that contextual factors and individual differences are crucial antecedents of employees’ feedback-seeking behavior (Ashford et al, 2003; Anseel et al, 2015). Among these contextual factors, leaders play the dominant role in followers’ work lives (Chen et al, 2015). Whether and how employees’ feedbackseeking behavior was encouraged by servant leadership remains unclear, it is of both theoretical and empirical importance to investigate the relationship between them

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