Does a leader pay a price for being servant? the negative effects of servant leadership behaviors on leaders' well-being

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study adopts job demands-resources theory as an overarching framework to examine the enactment of a servant leadership style and its potential negative effects on leaders themselves. Whereas much of the existing research literature about servant leadership focuses on how these leaders can improve follower and organizational outcomes, this study specifically investigates how this leadership style may act as an additional demand on the leaders who engage in it. Based on temporal separation data collected in Vietnam, the results indicated that engaging in servant leadership leads to emotional exhaustion by generating psychological job demand in terms of role overload. Moreover, the study identifies a boundary condition on the extent to which adopting servant leadership behaviors would be more stressful, by taking into account their followers’ characteristics. Specifically, the effect of servant leadership on leaders’ well-being is more strongly negative when leaders’ perception of subordinates’ manipulative intention is high. Theoretical, practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• ABSTRACT I
• CONTENTS II
• List of Figures IV
• List of Tables IV
• 1 INTRODUCTION 1
• 2 THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT AND HYPOTHESES 4
• 2.1 Servant leadership 4
• 2.2 Servant leadership and role overload 8
• 2.3 The indirect influence of servant leadership on leaders' well being through role overload 15
• 2.4 Subordinates' manipulative intention as a moderator 17
• 3 METHOD 22
• 3.1 Sample and procedure 22
• 3.2 Measure 23
• 4 RESULTS 26
• 4.1 Preliminary analyses 26
• 4.2 Descriptive statistics 29
• 4.3 Hypothesis tests 29
• 5 DISCUSSION 34
• 5.1 Theoretical implications 34
• 5.2 Limitations and future research 36
• 5.3 Practical implications 38
• 6 CONCLUSIONS 40
• APPENDIX 41
• Section one: Demographic data 41
• Section two: Servant leadership behaviours 43
• Section three: Followers' manipulative intention 44
• Section four: Role overload 45
• Section five: Emotional exhaustion 46
• REFERENCES 47