Personal growth or servant leader: What do hotel employees need most to be affectively well amidst the turbulent COVID-19 times?

Abstract

With a focus on serving employees' highest priority needs, servant leaders can promote affective well-being. An important mechanism by which this relationship may manifest is through elevating employees' personal growth, which elicits positive effects that are connected with feelings of affective well-being. However, in turbulent times, furloughed employees may appreciate having a leader who cares for them and is attentive to their needs rather than experiencing personal growth. Using structural equation modeling to analyze a sample of 205 Spanish hotel employees after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we found that servant leadership increased the affective well-being of employees both directly and by elevating their personal growth. A multigroup analysis, together with the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, also revealed that, for active employees, both having a servant leader and experiencing personal growth were important for feeling affective well-being. However, for furloughed employees, only being supported by a caring leader was important. Thus, we shed new light on the mechanisms underlying the positive effect of servant leadership on employees' affective well-being and how this link works in times of severe change, such as those caused by the pandemic.