Implications of Servant Leadership for Leaders

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in servant leadership, resulting in substantial evidence of its beneficial effects for employees, group and organizational outcomes. Despite the impressive progress researchers made over these years, the implications of servant leadership for leaders still remains largely unknown. This study attempts to address this issue by looking into the questions related to what consequences servant leadership brings to leaders, how the process unfolds, and when the influence is more likely to occur. Adopting conservation of resources theory as overarching framework and using multilevel, multisource, multistage data collected from a sample of 89 supervisors and 536 employees, we found that servant leadership was beneficial for leaders'workplace (i.e., task performance, job satisfaction) and work-family interface (i.e., work-to-family conflict, work-to-family enrichment) outcomes through leaders reducing their resource loss (operationalized by emotional exhaustion) and generating psychological resources in terms of positive affect, work meaningfulness, and need satisfaction. Moreover, our results revealed boundary conditions for the resource generating mechanisms. Specifically, the positive effects of servant leadership on positive affect, work meaningfulness, and need satisfaction were less salient when leaders' perceived organizational support was high. Key words: Servant leadership, COR theory, resource loss, resource generation, workplace and work-family interface outcomes