Servant leadership and engagement: a dual mediation model Yuanjie Bao and Chaoping Li

School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, and

Hao Zhao Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare two mediating mechanisms of servant leadership’s effect on followers’ work engagement: the social exchange mechanism (represented by leader-member exchange (LMX)) and the social learning mechanism (represented by public service motivation in Study 1 and prosocial motivation in Study 2). Design/methodology/approach – In Study 1, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 216 public sector employees. In Study 2, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 178 private sector employees. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses. Findings – Servant leadership is positively related to follower’s work engagement and this relationship is mediated by LMX, but not by public service motivation (Study 1) or prosocial motivation (Study 2). It suggests that servant leadership promotes followers’ work engagement mostly through the social exchange mechanism. Research limitations/implications – The data were collected from Chinese employees, and future studies are necessary to verify the findings in other cultural contexts. Originality/value – This study sheds light on a more nuanced picture of the effect mechanisms of servant leadership. Keywords Servant leadership, Leader-member exchange, Public service motivation, Prosocial motivation, Work engagement Paper type Research paper

Introduction Servant leaders put followers’ interests before their own and act in a moral and humble manner (van Dierendonck, 2011). Empirically, researchers reported that servant leadership is related to various outcomes, such as job performance (e.g. Schwarz et al., 2016), organizational commitment (e.g. Carter and Baghurst, 2014), helping (e.g. Neubert et al., 2008), organizational citizenship behavior (e.g. Walumbwa et al., 2010) and engagement (e.g. Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2017). We find engagement, as a positive job attitude (van Dierendonck, 2011), is a relatively under studied but important outcome. Engaged workers display desirable motivation and behaviors like vigor, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli et al., 2006). In this paper, we investigate how servant leadership affects followers’ work engagement using one sample from the public sector and another sample from the private sector.

Extant research has taken two directions to explain the effects of servant leadership. The first proposed mediating mechanism is based on social exchange theory (Blau, 1964). Servant leaders can form “social exchange relationships with their followers, rather than relying solely on the economic incentives in the employment agreement or the authority vested in their

Journal of Managerial Psychology Vol. 33 No. 6, 2018 pp. 406-417 © Emerald Publishing Limited 0268-3946 DOI 10.1108/JMP-12-2017-0435

Received 23 January 2018 Revised 15 April 2018 8 August 2018 Accepted 28 August 2018

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0268-3946.htm

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos 71772171 and 71372159), the project of “985” in China and the Social Sciences planning projects from the Ministry of Education (Grant No. 17YJA630073). The three authors made equal contribution to this paper. The order of author names is presented by the alphabetical order of their family names.

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positions” (Liden et al., 2008, p. 163). Social exchange involves at least an expectation of reciprocation, so that both parties will find the relationship rewarding and worthwhile to continue (Blau, 1964). It is assumed that by helping the personal and professional growth of employees, a servant leader creates an obligation on followers to reciprocate in the long term, and the target of the reciprocation is the leader or the organization represented by the leader. Servant leadership researchers examined various mediators in the social exchange category, including leader-member exchange (LMX; e.g. Newman et al., 2017), followers’ need satisfaction (e.g. Chiniara and Bentein, 2016; van Dierendonck et al., 2014), commitment to the leader (e.g. Walumbwa et al., 2010) and affective trust in the leader (e.g. Schaubroeck et al., 2011).

The second mediating mechanism is based on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), especially the vicarious learning process. Through the observation of positive, role modeling behaviors by the servant leaders, followers will learn these behaviors and will seek to replicate them in other social contexts, such as when interacting with the community, the customers or the coworkers. It goes beyond the dyadic exchange relationship between the leader and the follower, to benefit a broader range of stakeholders. It is consistent with the tenet of servant leadership theory that servant leaders take into account multiple stakeholders, including the larger society (Liden et al., 2008). In essence, through their altruistic behaviors, servant leaders will be able to induce followers to mirror and become servants themselves. There are only a few empirical studies examining the social learning mechanism, and the key mediating variables examined include serving culture (e.g. Liden et al., 2014) and service climate (Hunter et al., 2013) at the group level, and public service motivation at the individual level (e.g. Schwarz et al., 2016).

These two perspectives imply very different and even contrasting processes, in that the first is driven by self-interest and the second by altruism. Unfortunately, so far researchers overlooked the theoretical difference, and to our knowledge, no study has examined the two types of mediating mechanisms in the same research model side by side. We fill the gap by testing the dual mediation model with one sample from the public sector, and another sample from the private sector. This differential replication design (Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993) is necessary to validate our results, because employees who self-selected into the public sector and private sector may have different levels of altruistic motivation, and different work expectations.

Study 1 Servant leadership and work engagement Servant leaders put the interests of the served before their own. It is these conscious choices made by the servants that eventually made them leaders (Graham, 1991). Servant leaders are moral, socially responsible and emphasize followers’ interests and developments (Parris, 2013; van Dierendonck, 2011; Avolio et al., 2009).

Work engagement is a positive and fulfilling job attitude (van Dierendonck, 2011). Engaged workers display higher levels of vigor, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli et al., 2006). Vigor means that an employee has a high level of energy and resilience at work; dedication means that the employee has positive feelings at work such as significance, competence and personal growth; and absorption means that the employee is so attached to, immersed in and concentrated at work that he/she feels that time flies by and that it is hard to detach from work (Bakker et al., 2014). Work engagement has been found to be further related to positive work attitudes, individual well-being, extra role and helping behaviors, and performance (Christian et al., 2011; Halbesleben, 2010). Scholars often use the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to explain the inducement of work engagement (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008; Bakker et al., 2014). According to this model, all jobs are characterized by job demands and resources and work engagement is the outcome of an individual’s psychological assessment and experiences related to those job demands and resources (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008). So far, however, leadership has not been considered a main job resource to induce engagement (Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2014).

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We propose that servant leadership could be a powerful organizational resource, in buffering the negative effects of job demands and promoting followers’ engagement. From the JD-R perspective, followers would have sufficient personal and social resources if their leaders are competent, empowering, helping and sacrificing for them. Also, if the followers believe that what they are doing is ethically and morally correct and beneficial to the community and the larger society, they would have positive internal assessment and elevated self-esteem (Chen et al., 2015), which are job resources that can induce work engagement (Xanthopoulou et al., 2009). Recently, Petrou et al. (2012) applied the JD-R model to study employees’ daily interactions with the environment and they found that direct supervisors play an important role in employees’ evaluation of the job. Being a “significant other,” the direct supervisor’s attitudes and behaviors are a very important channel for followers to construct their perception of job sources and demands. Thus, when receiving servant leaders’ help and guidance, we expect followers to feel psychologically empowered and meaningful. These positive feelings are in the “positive circle” of the JD-R model that can promote followers’ work engagement (Bakker, 2015). There are some initial evidence on the relationship between servant leadership and engagement among employees in Europe (van Dierendonck et al., 2014; Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2017). Based on the above rationale, we hypothesized the following:

H1. Servant leadership is positively related to work engagement.

The social exchange mechanism: LMX Servant leadership is a leadership approach in which “leaders set aside their self-interest and altruistically work for the benefit of their followers, and the communities” (Newman et al., 2017, p. 49), while LMX measures the overall quality of the social exchange process between leaders and followers, making it a core concept in relationship-based leadership (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995). Both servant leadership and LMX emphasize attention to followers’ needs, but focusing primarily on the relationship quality, “LMX theory is silent with respect to the provision of personal healing, the development of followers into servant leaders, and the encouragement of service to the community” (Liden et al., 2008, p. 163). Leaders and followers form relationships based on their interactions in the past (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995; Liden et al., 1997), thus LMX can be perceived as a consequence of servant leadership. Followers of a servant leader will enjoy more opportunities and controls at work and grow faster, thus develop higher quality of relationships with the leader.

According to social exchange theory, one tends to reciprocate received favors, in hope to receive more benefits from future social exchanges. To maintain a balanced and equitable social exchange with their leader, followers must be emotionally close to the servant leaders (i.e. high LMX), and at the same time reciprocate with positive job attitudes and behaviors to satisfy the leader and the organization the leader represents. Work engagement is a clear signal to the leader that the follower is energetic in performing his or her assigned work, thus a desirable response to servant leadership. Empirical research shows that servant leadership is related to LMX among employees in China (Newman et al., 2017) and USA (Liden et al., 2008), and that LMX is related to police officers’ work engagement in Netherland (Breevaart et al., 2015). Based on the above rationale and evidence, we hypothesized the following:

H2. LMX mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement.

The social learning mechanism: public service motivation Social learning perspective offers a different view of the mediating mechanism. Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) posits that individuals can learn vicariously through observing and imitating others. Servant leaders provide good role models for the followers by altruistically helping followers and the community, thus their altruistic behaviors are likely to be replicated

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by the followers when they interact with other stakeholders such as coworkers, customers, or the larger society. Such role-modeling effects are in line with servant leadership theory. In fact, Greenleaf (1977) indicated that the best test of a servant leader is whether his or her followers will become servants themselves. In a similar vein, Liden et al. (2008) argued that servant leaders prepare the organization and its members to contribute to the larger society. One study has shown that “servant leaders ignite a cycle of service by role-modeling servant behavior that is then mirrored through coworker helping behavior and high-quality customer service” (Hunter et al., 2013, p. 316). Interestingly, this purported effect of servant leadership on individual’s altruistic motivation is rarely tested (an exception is Schwarz et al., 2016), and its relative effect to the social exchange mechanism is not clear.

We designed two studies to compare the relative effects of the social exchange mechanism and the social learning mechanism. In Study 1 involving public sector employees, we use LMX as a proxy for former mechanism and public service motivation as a proxy for the latter. Public service motivation is an important and frequently studied construct in studies of public employees, referring to “a general altruistic motivation to serve the interests of a community of people, a state, a nation, or humankind” (Rainey and Steinbauer, 1999, p. 23). Its intended beneficiaries go beyond the leader and the organization. Employees with high public service motivation are altruistic and do not expect reciprocity from the recipients of their services, making it clearly different from the social exchange perspective. A servant leader who puts the interest of the employees, the community and the public above his or her own would be a good role model and help enhance followers’ public service motivation. With higher public service motivation, followers are likely to feel dedicated and resilient at work, and stay engaged in their work despite the work-related stress:

H3a. Public service motivation mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement.

The proposed dual mediation hypotheses are depicted in Figure 1.

Method Sample and procedure. We asked 40 public employees enrolled in a part-time Master’s of Public Administration degree program at a public university in China to invite ten of their colleagues to participate in the survey. We send links to the online survey to their personal e-mail addresses and we assure the confidentiality. Immediate supervisors’ servant leadership and respondents’ demographic information were measured in the first round of the survey, which was conducted at the end of 2015. Two months later, we measured LMX, public service motivation, and work engagement. We offered 50 Chinese yuan (approximately $7.4) to the respondents who complete both rounds of survey. Among the 400 contacted public employees, 283 responded in the first round, and 223 responded in the second round, yielding a response rate of 56.5 percent. We used 216 responses for final analysis due to missing data. Among the 216 respondents, 103 (47.7 percent) were female,

Servant Leadership

LMX

Work Engagement

PSM/PM

Notes: LMX, leader-member exchange; PSM, public service motivation; PM, prosocial motivation

Figure 1. Theoretical model of servant leadership

and work engagement

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the average age was 32.22 (SD ¼ 6.52), 12 had a junior college degree (5.6 percent), 136 had a bachelor degree (63 percent), 63 had a master’s degree (29.2 percent), and 5 had received their doctorate degree (2.3 percent). The average tenure with their direct supervisor was 2.56 years (SD ¼ 2.57).

Measures. We used established scales published in English journals, and translated them to Chinese using a standard back-translation approach (Brislin, 1970).

Servant leadership. We used seven items from Liden et al. (2015) to measure servant leadership. It was a seven-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). A sample item was “My leader can tell if something work-related is going wrong.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.88.

LMX. We used seven items from Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) seven-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) to measure LMX. A sample item is “My supervisor recognizes my potential very well.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.85.

Public service motivation. We used a sixteen-item scale from Kim et al. (2013) to measure public service motivation. It was on a five-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A sample item was “I am prepared to make sacrifices for the good of society.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.91.

Work engagement. We used the nine-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al., 2002). It was on a seven-point Likert-scale, ranging from 0 (never) to 6 (everyday). A sample item is “At my work, I feel bursting with energy.” The Cronbach’s α for this scale is 0.93.

Control variables. Respondents’ gender (0¼ female, 1¼ male), age (in years) and educational level (1¼ junior college, 2 ¼ bachelor’s, 3 ¼ master’s, 4¼ doctorate), and dyadic tenure with the leader (in years) were included as controls because of their potential relationships with outcome variable.

Results Descriptive statistics. The means, standard deviations and inter-correlations among the variables are reported in Table I. Servant leadership is positively related to LMX (r ¼ 0.37, po0.01), and work engagement (r ¼ 0.28, po0.01). LMX is positively related to public service motivation (r ¼ 0.23, po0.01) and work engagement (r ¼ 0.42, po0.01). Public service motivation is positively related to work engagement (r ¼ 0.21, po0.01).

Hypothesis testing. As can be seen from Table II, servant leadership is positively related to work engagement ( β ¼ 0.30, po0.001, Model 6) after taking into the effects of control variables. H1 is supported.

H2 and H3 predicted that LMX and public service motivation will each mediate the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement. As can be seen from

Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. Gender 0.52 0.50 2. Age 32.22 6.35 0.03 3. Education – – 0.05 0.00 4. Tenure with leader 2.56 2.57 −0.06 0.33** 0.14* 5. Servant leadership 3.57 0.87 0.13 −0.11 −0.01 −0.16* (0.88) 6. LMX 4.95 1.00 0.18* 0.07 0.07 −0.09 0.37** (0.85) 7. PSM 4.43 0.48 0.00 0.11 −0.16* 0.01 0.10 0.23** (0.91) 8. Work engagement 3.50 1.02 0.05 0.20** 0.04 −0.01 0.28** 0.42** 0.21** (0.93) Notes: n ¼ 216. LMX, leader member exchange; PSM, public service motivation. Cronbach’s αs were reported in parentheses. For gender, 0 ¼ female, 1 ¼ male. *po0.05; **po0.01

Table I. Means, standard deviations and correlations among examined variables for Study 1

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Table II, servant leadership is positively related to LMX ( β ¼ 0.36, po0.001, Model 2), but not public service motivation ( β ¼ 0.11, pW0.05, Model 4). In Model 7, controlling for servant leadership, LMX was significantly related to engagement ( β ¼ 0.32, po0.001) while public service motivation was marginally related with engagement ( β ¼ 0.11, po0.1) and the effect of servant leadership on engagement was still significant ( β ¼ 0.17, po0.05). The total indirect effect of servant leadership on engagement was 0.148 (95% CI ¼ [0.085, 0.250]). The indirect effect through LMX was 0.134 (95% CI ¼ [0.071, 0.233]) and significant, supporting H2. The indirect effect through public service motivation was 0.014 (95% CI ¼ [−0.004, 0.050]) and insignificant. H3a was not supported.

Study 2 A limitation of Study 1 is that employees who self-select into the public sector may have higher altruistic tendency compared to other working populations, and serving the public is part of their job requirements instead of a discretionary choice. This range restriction in their public service motivation may be an alternative cause for the insignificant mediation effect. We performed a differential replication (Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993) with a second sample from the private sector to validate our findings. Although the majority of the research design remained the same for Study 2, we choose to replace the scale of public service motivation, because its wording was designed for the public sector. We use a more general construct, prosocial motivation, as the proxy of the social learning mechanism. Grant (2008, p. 49) defined prosocial motivation as “the desire to expend effort to benefit other people.” Given the similarity between the public service motivation and prosocial motivation concepts, some researchers treated the two interchangeably (e.g. Wright and Grant, 2010), while others view public service motivation as a particular form of prosocial motivation “that is animated by specific dispositions and values arising from public institutions and missions” (Perry et al., 2010, p. 682).

Many studies on servant leadership are actually based on leader samples from the private sector (e.g. Hunter et al., 2013; Liden et al., 2008). We expect the social learning mechanism of servant leadership will take place in the private sector as well. Through direct observations and interactions, followers of servant leaders will admire their leaders as role models, and become motivated to emulate them to serve a broad range of others such as coworkers,

LMX PSM Work engagement Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7

Step 1: control variables Gender 0.16* 0.12 0.01 −0.01 0.03 −0.00 −0.04 Age 0.10 0.13 0.11 0.12 0.23** 0.25** 0.20** Education 0.07 0.07 −0.16* −0.16* 0.05 0.05 0.04 Tenure with leader −0.12**** −0.08 −0.00 0.01 −0.10 −0.06 −0.03

Step 2: main effect Servant leadership 0.36*** 0.11 0.30*** 0.17**

Step 3: mediating variables LMX 0.32*** PSM 0.11**** Overall F 2.78* 8.82*** 2.00**** 2.12**** 2.75* 6.55*** 9.53*** R2 0.05 0.17 0.04 0.05 0.05 0.14 0.24 ▵F 31.37*** 2.54 20.73*** 14.82*** ▵R2 0.12 0.01 0.09 0.11 Notes: n ¼ 216. Standardized coefficients are reported. *po0.05; **po0.01; ***po0.001; ****po0.1

Table II. Hierarchical

regression results for mediation for Study 1

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customers, the community and the society. With a strong prosocial motivation, they will be ready to overcome challenges and feel energized, dedicated and engaged in doing their work:

H3b. Prosocial motivation mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement.

Method Sample and procedure. We asked 40 part-time graduate students from the same university as Study 1 who are working in the private sector to each invite ten colleagues or friends working in the private sector to participate in an online survey. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured again. The first round of data collection was in the middle of 2018, and we asked the respondents to report their immediate supervisors’ servant leadership and demographic information. Two weeks later, we measured LMX, prosocial motivation and work engagement. We offered 30 Chinese yuan (approximately $4.5) to compensate respondents who complete both rounds of survey. Among the 400 contacted private employees, 305 responded in the first round, and 202 responded in the second round, yielding a response rate of 50.5 percent. We used 178 responses for final analysis due to missing data. Among them, 104 (58.4 percent) were female, the average age was 32.61 (SD¼ 6.24), 27 had a junior college degree (15.2 percent), 93 had a bachelor degree (52.2 percent), 49 had a master’s degree (27.5 percent) and 6 had received their doctorate degree (3.4 percent), while 3 reported other degrees. The average tenure with their direct supervisor was 2.90 years (SD ¼ 3.57).

Measures. Servant leadership, LMX and work engagement were measured with the same scales and anchors as Study 1. We measured prosocial motivation with four items from Grant (2008). A sample item is “It is important for me to do good for other through my work.” As shown in Table III, the Cronbach’s αs of variables in our research model varied between 0.84 and 0.93. We used the same set of control variables as in Study 1.

Results Descriptive statistics. The means, standard deviations and inter-correlations among the variables are reported in Table III.

Hypothesis testing. As can be seen from Table IV, servant leadership is positively related to work engagement ( β ¼ 0.28, po0.001, Model 6) after taking into the effects of control variables. H1 is supported.

Also can be seen from Table IV, servant leadership is positively related to LMX ( β ¼ 0.58, po0.001, Model 2), but not prosocial motivation ( β ¼ 0.07, pW0.05, Model 4). In Model 7, controlling for servant leadership, LMX ( β ¼ 0.29, po0.001) and prosocial motivation ( β ¼ 0.34, po0.001) were significantly related to engagement, while the effect of servant leadership on engagement was no longer significant ( β ¼ 0.09, pW0.05). The total

Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. Gender 0.42 0.49 2. Age 32.61 6.23 −0.02 3. Education – – 0.02 −0.01 4. Tenure with leader 2.90 3.57 0.05 0.37** −0.07 5. Servant leadership 3.23 0.78 −0.02 −0.12 0.13 −0.08 (0.84) 6. LMX 4.67 1.01 0.05 0.07 0.00 0.06 0.56** (0.91) 7. Prosocial motivation 4.13 0.56 −0.07 0.08 0.07 0.03 0.07 0.16* (0.86) 8. Work engagement 3.43 0.95 −0.01 0.15 −0.05 −0.10 0.25** 0.39** 0.39** (0.93) Notes: n ¼ 178. LMX, leader member exchange. Cronbach’s αs were reported in parentheses. For gender, 0 ¼ female, 1 ¼ male. *po0.05; **po0.01

Table III. Means, standard deviations and correlations among examined variables for Study 2

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indirect effect of servant leadership on engagement was 0.233 (95% CI ¼ [0.048, 0.425]). The indirect effect through LMX was 0.204 (95% CI ¼ [0.039, 0.388]) and significant, supporting H2. The indirect effect through prosocial motivation was 0.029 (95% CI ¼ [−0.040, 0.125]) and insignificant. H3b was not supported. In general, results from Study 2 are consistent with our findings from Study 1.

Discussion Servant leadership research is at its “early state of theoretical development” with many unanswered questions (Liden et al., 2014, p. 1449). This study enriches servant leadership literature by comparing the dual mediating mechanisms of servant leadership’s effect on work engagement. These results have important theoretical and practical implications.

Theoretical implications Servant leadership is often seen as a promising and “a stand-alone leadership approach that is capable of helping leadership researchers and practitioners better explain a wide range of outcomes” (Hoch et al., 2018, p. 501). When it comes to the exact effect mechanism, a big theoretical difference between the social exchange perspective and the social learning perspective is that the exchange process involves expected reciprocation of favors between parties, while the learning (or modeling) process involves serving a broader range of stakeholders and the service is more altruistic in nature. Our study represents an early effort to explicitly stress the theoretical difference and compare the relative magnitudes of each mediation mechanism.

From our results, it seems servant leadership’s effect on work engagement is primarily through the social exchange process, instead of through the social learning process. To be specific, servant leadership is related to LMX only, but not significantly related to employees’ public service motivation or prosocial motivation, even though LMX, public service motivation and prosocial motivation are all related to engagement. It appears that followers simply treat servant leadership as yet another well-intended leadership style: followers will appreciate the inducement and favors from the leaders and feel obligated to reciprocate with organizationally desired workplace behaviors. There is no strong evidence to confirm followers’ motivation to emulate their servant leaders to serve

LMX Prosocial motivation Work engagement Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7

Step 1: control variables Gender 0.05 0.07 −0.07 −0.07 0.00 0.01 0.01 Age 0.06 0.13**** 0.08 0.08 0.21** 0.24** 0.18* Education 0.01 −0.07 0.08 0.07 −0.06 −0.09 −0.10 Tenure with leader 0.04 0.05 0.01 0.01 −0.18 −0.18* −0.20**

Step 2: main effect Servant leadership 0.58*** 0.07 0.28*** 0.09

Step 3: mediating variables LMX 0.29*** Prosocial motivation 0.34*** Overall F 0.43 17.71*** 0.74 0.76 2.34**** 5.04*** 11.22*** R2 0.01 0.34 0.02 0.02 0.05 0.13 0.32 ▵F 85.99*** 0.83 15.06*** 23.40*** ▵R2 0.33 0.01 0.08 0.19 Notes: n ¼ 178. Standardized coefficients are reported. *po0.05; **po0.01; ***po0.001; ****po0.1

Table IV. Hierarchical

regression results for mediation for Study 2

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others, which is assumed a strength and unique component of servant leadership theory (Liden et al., 2008). This link is broken for both of our samples.

On surface, it seems counter-intuitive that employees enjoy developing a high-quality exchange relationship with their servant leader, but they are not interested to imitate their leaders to serve other stakeholders altruistically. However, the result may be attributed to the larger cultural context. O’Reilly and Chatman (1986) specified that there are three forms of interpersonal influence: compliance, affiliation and internalization. The highest and most difficult-to-achieve level is internalization. Followers may admire certain attributes and behaviors of their leader and feel proud of their affiliation with the leader (i.e. LMX), but they will not adopt such attributes as their own if there is a lack of value congruence (p. 493). Chinese culture, in general, is characterized by hierarchies and high power distance (Spencer-Oatey, 1997), where people tend to accept and even expect unequally distributed power. It is thus difficult for followers to internalize the humility and altruism attributes of their servant leaders. Followers may perceive servant leaders as a rare hero or exemplar at a high and distant level, but remain skeptical whether they can or should replicate such servant behaviors, especially when they feel they have limited resources inside and outside of the organization to sustain such behaviors. Furthermore, the government plays a central role in Chinese society, so public employees may see themselves as “officials” instead of true servants in front of the general public. Even though they are very willing to reciprocate the service rendered by their leaders, they may not feel comfortable delivering the same quality of service toward people they “manage.” It may be unrealistic to assume the modeling process will take place naturally. Future studies are needed to investigate what servant leaders can do to encourage followers emulate their service behaviors, and investigate if the results remain the same in other cultural contexts.

We caution that it is premature to conclude the learning/modeling process is completely not working, even in Chinese public sector. Schwarz et al. (2016) found that servant leadership is related to public service motivation among a group of government employees in Zhejiang, which is a wealthy province on the east coast of China, known for its booming private enterprises (Ye and Wei, 2005). The important role of private economy may have changed the local cultural norm and helped employees to accept equality and internalize the values of servant leaders. Our sample was drawn from many places of China, thus a better representation of typical Chinese employees’ values at the moment. However, as China gets more globalized and market-economy-oriented, employees’ personal values will change too, so we expect both the social exchange mechanism and the social learning mechanism hypothesized in our study may be supported in future studies.

Practical implications Our study has practical implications for managers. We found that servant leadership can help produce engaged employees. Leaders can motivate by putting followers’ interests before their own, by engaging in moral and ethical decision making, and by developing and mentoring followers. Our study underlines the important role of social exchange in the servant leadership’s influence. By building stronger LMX with employees, servant leaders can boost the morale in the organization and increase employees’ dedication to work. We advocate including service-orientation as an important criterion for leaders’ selection and promotion.

To help the social learning process, we encourage servant leaders making themselves more visible to the employees and performing more frequent visits and communications with followers including those who do not directly report to the leaders. By closing the distance from employees, a leader makes it easier for employees to learn from and to follow the leader. Another way is to assign servant leaders as mentors to junior leaders to work on projects together, so that they can learn the complex decision-making process when their servant leaders face a dilemma, instead of just the decision itself or the impact of the decision.

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Limitations and future directions This study should be considered in light of its limitations. In addition to the single cultural context we mentioned above, we caution that our data were reported by followers only. We used time-lagged design to minimize common method variance. But in order to fully address the direction of causality, it would be optimal to measure key variables at more time points, from different data sources, and over a longer span. It will also help to use a less obtrusive data collection method such as diary study (Bakker, 2015) to record followers’ perceptions of servant leadership and subsequent reactions.

Conclusion We found that servant leadership is an antecedent of work engagement, and this effect is primarily through the social exchange process, while the social learning process is relatively difficult to take place. In practical terms, our study shows how important it is to use servant leadership to build strong relationships with employees and boost their work motivation.

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416

JMP 33,6