Servant leadership: A meta‐analytic examination of incremental contribution, moderation, and mediation

By Allan Lee, Joanne Lyubovnikova, A. Tian, Caroline Knight. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2019

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Demography, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f657465d04dbbea765ad86538471a2eb2be2e113

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Allan Lee
2. J. Hakanen
3. A. Tian
4. A. Legood
5. Janne Kaltiainen
6. Alexander Newman

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. A. Legood
2. Alexander Newman
3. Allan Lee
4. A. Tian
5. Janne Kaltiainen
6. Caroline Knight
7. D. A. Hughes
8. J. Hakanen

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Hakanen
2. A. Tian
3. Caroline Knight
4. A. Legood
5. Janne Kaltiainen
6. Alexander Newman
7. Allan Lee

Citations in the corpus

• Fostering task and adaptive performance through employee well-being: The role of servant leadership (2020, background): “Accordingly, accumulating evidence has linked servant leadership with an array of outcomes, such as higher trust, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and lower turnover intentions even over and above other leadership constructs, including transformational, authentic, and ethical leadership ”
• Leadership, creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review (2020, background): “For instance, five recent metaanalyses have examined whether authentic (Banks et al., 2016), ethical (Ng & Feldman, 2015), servant (Lee et al., 2019) and empowering (Lee et al., 2018) leadership explain incremental variance over and above established variables such as transformational leadership…”