Impact of Servant Leadership on Performance: The Mediating Role of Affective and Cognitive Trust

Farida Saleem,Ahmad Adeel,Yingying Zhang Zhang,C Gopinath

doi:10.1177/2158244019900562

Abstract

Servant leadership style has drawn much attention in the last decade to leadership studies on account of its focus on serving others first. Extant literature calls for a better understanding of the underlying mechanism for servant leadership to positively influence performance within an organization. We position servant leadership to contribute to firms’ sustainable performance, by empirically studying the mediating mechanism of bi-dimensional trust, namely affective and cognitive trust, between servant leadership and individual performance. Our data comprised of dyadic samples of 233 pairs of subordinates and their supervisors. The results from hierarchical linear model (HLM) for clustered data showed that servant leadership strongly predicted affective trust, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), and task performance of subordinates; affective trust fully mediated servant leadership’s effect on task performance while partially mediates servant leadership’s effect on subordinates’ OCB. In contrast, cognitive trust did not mediate servant leadership’s effect on either OCB or task performance. These findings reveal the relevance of affective trust as the underlying mechanism which mediates and deciphers servant leadership into positive individual performance.

Highlights

Servant leadership has been recognized as a leadership philosophy addressing the concerns of ethics (Carter & Baghurst, 2014)
As servant leaders help to empower and develop their followers through expressing humility and stewardship, legitimacy, and by providing direction (Ling et al, 2017; van Dierendonck, 2011), we argue that both affective and cognitive trust will positively mediate the relationship of servant leadership and subordinates’ task performance
To confirm the pattern of mediation, we regressed task performance on servant leadership and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) on servant leadership in the presence of affective trust. Results of these regression analyses are shown in Table 4; in the presence of affective trust, we found a insignificant relationship of servant leadership with task performance (β = .225, p < .10) and a significant coefficient with reduced magnitude of the relationship between servant leadership and OCB (β = .466, p < .05)

Summary

Introduction

Servant leadership has been recognized as a leadership philosophy addressing the concerns of ethics (Carter & Baghurst, 2014). As a burgeoning research area, servant leadership links leadership to ethics, virtues, and morality (Lanctot & Irving, 2010; Parris & Peachey, 2013) It has attracted research interest in the field of organizational studies in the last decades with its special attention to the leader’s role as a servant, putting the needs of others first to foster positive organizational outcomes (Lapointe & vandernberghe, 2018; Liu, 2019; Newman et al, 2017). This focus on serving others dramatically shifts the center of leadership studies from solely leading to balancing the paradox of leading and serving at the same time. This paradoxical leadership function and style of servant provides critical mechanisms in the workplace to safeguard business ethics of an organization while seeking performance

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Conclusion