A conditional time-varying multivariate latent growth curve model for the relationships between academics’ servant leadership behavior, affective commitment, and job performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In our study, we investigated the change patterns in academics’ servant leadership behavior and affective commitment during and after the first Covid-19 lockdown (April 2020–August 2020) in Malaysia. Furthermore, we evaluated the influence of academics’ servant leadership behavior on job performance through affective commitment. We applied additional analyses to determine the degree to which the two former constructs are influenced by age and academic rank. To do so, we leveraged multivariate latent growth curve (LGC) modeling in analyzing the longitudinal data collected from 220 academics at three time points over a course of four months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results showed that, while servant leadership and affective commitment were stable over time, servant leadership was a driver of affective commitment and job performance. We also observed that affective commitment significantly mediated the relationship between academics’ servant leadership behavior and job performance. Moreover, we found interindividual differences in servant leadership and affective commitment in terms of age and academic rank at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. Our multi-disciplinary research is among the limited number of studies applying a rigorous, longitudinal approach to examine behaviors (i.e., servant leadership and job performance) and attitudes (i.e., affective commitment) during the Covid-19 pandemic in higher education research.

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“…This study explores the impact of servant leadership on employee performance, revealing positive correlation supported by research from Ghasemy and Frömbling (2023). Performance improvement is obtained from the more frequent servant leadership approach given to employees Yahia et al (2023).…”

“…Ghasemy and Frömbling (2023) claimed that the rise in employees' affective commitment to their company can be influenced by servant leadership. The approach shown by servant leadership can foster affective commitment owned by individual employees (Ghasemy & Frömbling, 2023). Employees who feel empowered are typically very devoted to the company (Aboramadan et al, 2020).…”

“…Leadership to Employee Performance Servant leadership is a driver of the emergence of affective commitment to improve performance (Ghasemy & Frömbling, 2023). Pakpahan et al (2021) claimed that the relationship between employee performance and servant leadership can be mediated by affective commitment.…”

Testing the “holy grail” of industrial psychology as a non-recursive bow pattern model in higher education using the PLSe2 method

“…Focusing on the consequences of affective states, the theory mentions that both affect-driven behaviors and attitudes are directly influenced by affective states while the latter is also predicted by work environment features (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). It is noteworthy that AET has been recently used to guide studies in applied higher education research (Ghasemy et al ., 2021a, 2022c; Ghasemy and Frömbling, 2022a, b, c; Ghasemy, 2022b).…”