Servant leadership in hospitality: a meta-analytic review

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although existing studies have performed sufficient retrospective analyses of servant leadership in hospitality research, until recently, few studies have quantitatively integrated the findings of numerous studies and provided a quantitative estimate for the relationship between servant leadership and follower outcomes in the hospitality context. This meta-analysis synthesized prior studies and examined various moderators between servant leadership and follower outcomes. The strongest impact of servant leadership was on followers’ satisfaction, followed by organizational commitment, service quality, work engagement, service climate, creativity, psychological capital, OCB and performance. However, the negative relationship between servant leadership and turnover was not supported. We also examined how individualism/collectivism, long-term/short-term orientation, femininity/masculinity, data collection, the data source of study samples and measurement of servant leadership influence the relationships between servant leadership and follower outcomes. At last we provide a detailed agenda for future research.