Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research

By N. Eva, Mulyadi Robin, Sen Sendjaya, Dirk van Dierendonck, R. Liden. Leadership Quarterly, 2019

1,527 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Notwithstanding the proliferation of servant leadership studies with over 100 articles published in the last four years alone, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its theory development. We provide an integrative and comprehensive review of the 285 articles on servant leadership spanning 20 years (1998–2018), and in so doing extend the field in four different ways. First, we provide a conceptual clarity of servant leadership vis-a-vis other value-based leadership approaches and offer a new definition of servant leadership. Second, we evaluate 16 existing measures of servant leadership in light of their respective rigor of scale construction and validation. Third, we map the theoretical and nomological network of servant leadership in relation to its antecedents, outcomes, moderators, mediators. We finally conclude by presenting a detailed future research agenda to bring the field forward encompassing both theoretical and empirical advancement. All in all, our review paints a holistic picture of where the literature has been and where it should go into the future.

Subfields: Demography, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/569d8319682646ed305162885df2ab53c269d01e

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In Demography

1. M. Aboramadan
2. C. Farao
3. Y. Kundi
4. J. Hakanen
5. Hun Whee Lee
6. Russell E. Johnson
7. Janne Kaltiainen
8. S. Lin

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. C. Farao
2. Y. Kundi
3. Janne Kaltiainen
4. M. Aboramadan
5. Trent Engbers
6. Taha Hameduddin
7. J. Hakanen
8. Sheng Xin

Citations in the corpus

• RETRACTED: The effect of servant leadership on group collective organizational deviance-mediating effect of team egoism (2021, background): “…leaders emphasize “service priority” rather than “leadership priority”, 10 attach importance to the development of subordinates and the interests of employees, 11 and will consider the interests of internal and external stakeholders in the decision-making process to build a community of interests.”
• Leadership and public service motivation: a systematic synthesis (2021, background): “Some forms of leadership focus explicitly on the development of altruistic traits such as service, humility, authenticity, interpersonal acceptance, and enhancing follower well-being (Eva et al. 2019).”
• Serving You Depletes Me? A Leader-Centric Examination of Servant Leadership Behaviors (2020, methodology): “Prior research has exclusively treated servant leadership as an average leadership style that differs between individuals and has effects primarily on recipients (i.e., followers; Eva et al., 2019; van Dierendonck, 2011).”
• Fostering task and adaptive performance through employee well-being: The role of servant leadership (2020, background): “…to understanding regarding servant leadership, which is “being held back by an over-reliance on cross-sectional, single respondent survey designs” (Eva et al., 2019: 124), burnout as “most studies do not regard burnout as an ongoing process that unfolds over time” (Bakker & Costa, 2014: 112)…”