Fostering task and adaptive performance through employee well-being: The role of servant leadership

Abstract

In this study, we provide insights on how servant leadership may promote employee performance. We investigate whether the associations between increases in servant leadership and employees’ task and adaptive performance are mediated by changes in the two antipodes of employee well-being: work engagement and burnout. We utilized a two-wave survey data ( N = 2453) collected from 34 organizations and latent change score modeling as an analytical approach to examine associations among within-person changes. Our findings showed that increased perceptions of servant leadership were associated with increases in work engagement and decreases in burnout. Increases in work engagement were associated with increases in task performance and four subfacets of adaptive performance (i.e., stress management, reactivity, creativity, and interpersonal adaptivity). Decreases in burnout were associated with increases in task performance. Our findings suggest that improved servant leadership practices may foster employees’ task and adaptive performance especially through the promotion of work engagement. JEL CLASSIFICATION: L200 Firm Objectives, Organization, Behavior: General

How to re-enchant workplaces and organizations? An introduction to the special issue

“…Namely, to understand what makes enchanted workplaces and how, as well as what it means to feel enchanted and how this state may be achieved by individuals. As concerns the former issue, the studies included in this special issue mainly focus on leadership and highlight how different leadership styles (e.g., servant or autonomous supportive leadership; Kaltiainen & Hakanen, 2020;Sarmah et al, 2021) or ways that leadership may be executed or shared (Salas-Vallina et al, 2021) may facilitate workplace enchantment. With regard to the latter, the studies of Griep et al and Pessi et al emphasize how intra-individual and inter-individual emotional experiences motivate employees to engage in behaviors that may not only help them make their own work more meaningful but also the work of others.…”

“…To this end, it would be interesting for future research to examine whether disenchanted workplaces elicit active negative emotions in employees that may trigger proactive behaviors that help change disenchanted to enchanted workplaces. Moreover, the studies on the role of leadership (i.e., Kaltiainen & Hakanen, 2020;Salas-Vallina et al, 2021;Sarmah et al, 2021) raise questions about other leadership styles or team processes that may facilitate workplace re-enchantment. To this end, ethical leadership (Frisch & Huppenbauer, 2014) could be a concept that seems relevant since ethical leaders through their telos (i.e., ethical behaviors and strategies) and ethos (i.e., personal attitudes and characteristics that are based on strong ethical foundations; Mitropoulou et al, 2019) may promote ethical cultures that facilitate workplace re-enchantment.…”

“…The first three papers by Salas-Vallina et al ( 2021), Kaltiainen andHakanen (2020), andSarmah et al (2021) address the issue of what makes enchanted workplaces and how. They do so by focusing on the role of teams and leaders, and by unraveling the processes through which specific team characteristics and specific leadership styles may promote enchanted teams and individuals.…”

The Role of Servant Leadership and Resilience in Predicting Work Engagement

“…Servant leadership is found to be correlated with more engaged employees by many studies (Eva et al, 2019;Hoch et al, 2018). Servant leadership implementations can boost employees' adaptive and task performance particularly through work engagement (Kaltiainen & Hakanen, 2020). Kaya and Karatepe (2020) also revealed the immediate supervisor's servant leadership positively correlate with higher employee work engagement.…”

“…Previous studies have proven a positive relationship between servant leadership and work engagement (e.g. Kaltiainen & Hakanen (2020), Kaya & Karatepe (2020). There is also a positive relationship between resilience and work engagement (e.g.…”