Servant leadership: A meta‐analytic examination of incremental contribution, moderation, and mediation
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology · 2019
Lee, Allan; Lyubovnikova, Joanne; Tian, Amy Wei; Knight, Caroline
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
servant leadership → organizational citizenship behavior ocb
servant leadership → task performance
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
servant leadership predicts counterproductive work behaviours
servant leadership predicts organizational citizenship behavior ocb
servant leadership predicts task performance
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Research suggests that when leaders, as servant leaders, focus on their followers’ needs, this can have a positive effect on organizational functioning. Yet results are inconsistent in establishing the strength of the relationships, limiting understanding of the theoretical impact and practical reach of the servant leadership ( SL ) construct. Using a quantitative meta‐analysis based on 130 independent studies, the current research provides evidence that SL has incremental predictive validity over transformational, authentic, and ethical leadership. Further, the link between SL and a range of individual‐ and team‐level behavioural outcomes can be partially explained by trust in the leader, procedural justice, and leader–member exchange. The paper also explores moderators to better establish SL 's criterion‐related validity and to clarify the magnitude of effects across boundary conditions, such as research design, national culture, and industry. Practitioner points Servant leadership has predictive validity over other leadership approaches, and therefore, organizations would benefit by developing their current leaders into SL s. Organizations should aim to select SL s into influential positions: Training programmes and selection profiles and processes would need to be aligned and developed to capture attitudes and behaviours associated with SL inside and outside the organization. Servant leaderships should seek to create a culture that positively promotes the development of trust, fairness, and high‐quality leader–follower relationships, as these conditions collectively enable the effects of SL to be transmitted onto desirable follower outcomes.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “And mainly with, Organization's behavior (Haase, Hoff, Hanel, & Innes-Ker, 2018), creativity (Arshad, 2020), psychological wellbeing (Clausen, Meng, & Borg, 2019), task performance (Lee, Lyubovnikova, Tian, & Knight, 2020), improved service only by empowering leadership (Li et al., 2016).”
supports “Employee service quality is usually affected by internal service quality,(3) leadership style,(5) customer participation,(6) employee job satisfaction and self-efficacy.(7,8) Many studies have shown that servant leadership has a positive effect on employees’ positive attitudes, work behaviors, and job performance.”
supports “Furthermore, a recent meta-analysis showed that procedural fairness partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior, voice behavior, and counterproductive behavior (A. Lee et al., 2020).”
supports “Furthermore, a recent meta-analysis showed that procedural fairness partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior, voice behavior, and counterproductive behavior (A. Lee et al., 2020).”
supports “As a result, there has been repeated demonstration of servant leadership’s predictive validity over other leadership models on a variety of outcomes (including trust, affective commitment, individual-level task performance, and team-level performance) (Hoch et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019).”
supports “…moderating role of national culture (e.g., power distance and individual collectivism) in investigating the impacts of servant leadership on employees’ outcomes (e.g, organizational citizenship behavior [OCB] and job performance) and team-level performance (Lee et al., 2020; Y. Zhang et al., 2021).”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.54692/ajss.2021.05041656
- 10.2147/prbm.s395377
- 10.1177/15480518241287647
- 10.2478/jeb-2021-0006
- 10.5817/sp2021-2-2
- 10.1177/23409444231168421
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.