How do servant leaders promote engagement? A bottom-up perspective of job crafting

Abstract

We drew on the literature addressing servant leadership and job crafting, self-determination theory, and the job demands–resources model, and hypothesized that employees who are supported by servant leadership would craft their own jobs to stay engaged and perform well. Chinese employees (N = 544) working in various organizations participated in a survey. We found that servant leadership, as evaluated by employees, predicted work engagement and that job crafting played a partial mediating role in this relationship. Results of structural equation modeling offered strong support for the proposed model. Specifically, empowering promoted employees' absorption through task crafting, and emotional healing promoted employees' vigor through relational crafting. Our findings enrich the literature on positive organizational behavior and will help with identifying practical considerations around promoting work engagement.

Reorienting job crafting research: A hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review

“…Another important context factor that affects individual proactive behavior is leadership. Some empirical studies have found a positive role of employee-oriented leadership (Lichtenthaler & Fischbach, 2018), empowering leadership (Esteves & Lopes, 2017a;Kim & Beehr, 2018;Thun & Bakker, 2018) and servant leadership (Bavik, Bavik, & Tang, 2017;Harju, Schaufeli, & Hakanen, 2018;Yang, Ming, Ma, & Huo, 2017) in shaping employee approach crafting. Those leaders give autonomy to employees and encourage employees to pursue long-term goals, thereby promoting employees' motivation to craft.…”

A New Model of Christian Leadership: Insights from the Job Demands–Resources Model and Trinitarian Theology

“…Similarly, a study of servant leaders showed servant leaders directly influence employee work engagement but also indirectly foster work engagement by processes of job crafting (Yang, Ming, & Ma, 2017). A succinct definition of job crafting is changing the tasks, relationships, or cognitions related to work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).…”

“…Job crafting includes employee actions of reviewing their work identity and work meaning. Yang et al (2017) identified a process whereby servant leaders empower employees by allowing them to schedule tasks and solve their own work problems and also provide the “emotional healing” of employees by listening sensitively to their concerns. These actions of empowerment and emotional healing promote employee job crafting and subsequent work engagement.…”

“…Illustrative goals that could be considered in trinitarian informed approaches to leadership include forming a caring community in the workplace; demonstrating respect, honesty, fairness, and the like in all workplace relationships; meeting important human needs; and promoting spiritual development. For each goal research may be needed to clarify the processes and leadership practices that are most conducive to the desired outcome, using the kinds of approaches demonstrated in research by Fernet et al (2015), Tims et al (2011), and Yang et al (2017).…”

An Exploration of Authentic, Servant, Transactional, and Transformational Leadership Styles in Fortune 500 CEO Letters

“…Furthermore, transformational and servant leaders were found to overlap in the study's top 25 codes (i.e., commitment, service, and community) as shown in Table 5. Yang, Ming, Jianhong, and Huo () performed a study on servant leaders to find that the use of servant leadership increases employee engagement. Furthermore, servant leadership can help improve organizational culture.…”