How Servant Leadership Influences Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Roles of LMX, Empowerment, and Proactive Personality

By Alexander Newman, G. Schwarz, B. Cooper, Sen Sendjaya. 2017

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the link between servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been established, the individual-level mechanisms underlying this relationship and its boundary conditions remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigate the salience of the mediating mechanisms of leader–member exchange (LMX) and psychological empowerment in explaining the process by which servant leaders elicit discretionary OCB among followers. We also examine the role of followers’ proactive personality in moderating the indirect effects of servant leadership on OCB through LMX and psychological empowerment. Analysis of survey data collected from 446 supervisor–subordinate dyads in a large Chinese state-owned enterprise suggests that while servant leadership is positively related to subordinate OCB through LMX, psychological empowerment does not explain any additional variance in OCB above that accounted for by LMX. Moderated mediation tests confirm the moderating effect of proactive personality through LMX. By providing a nuanced understanding of how and when servant leadership leads followers to go above and beyond their job role, our study assists organizations in deciding how to develop and utilize servant leaders in their organizations.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c64f9155e96711a4a715acfbf83c38a419fd156

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

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Citations in the corpus

Examination of the Relationships Between Servant Leadership, Organizational Commitment, and Voice and Antisocial Behaviors (2015, background): “The fact that servant leadership indirectly influenced employee behavior is consistent with recent research on servant leadership’s workings (e.g., Chen et al. 2015; Liden et al. 2014; Newman et al. 2015).”
Can altruistic leadership prevent knowledge-hiding behaviour? Testing dual mediation mechanisms (2020, background): “have explained that certain leadership style, such as servant leadership, affects LMX (Newman et al., 2017) and that high-quality social exchange relationships between a leader and subordinates (i.”
Impact of Servant Leadership on Performance: The Mediating Role of Affective and Cognitive Trust (2020, background): “Leadership studies have identified gender, age, tenure (Riordan et al., 2003), and education level of subordinate (Newman et al., 2017) as connected to employee work-related outcomes including OCB and task performance (Chiniara & Bentein, 2016).”
Servant leadership, organisational trust, and bank employee outcomes (2019, methodology): “To develop the aforesaid relationships, our study uses both servant leadership and social exchange theories (cf. Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005; Newman et al., 2017).”
The Functions of a Servant Leader (2017, background): “Other findings reported that servant leadership enhanced self-efficacy [46,86], person-job fit [59], person-organisational fit [12], and leader-member exchange [22,75,79].”