Leading People Positively: Cross-Cultural Validation of the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS)

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Spanish Journal of PsychologyThe current way of organizing and working together in organizations is undergoing continual change.Organizations face challenges and difficulties to which they must adapt in order to be competitive, particularly when facing the current recession, new technology improvements, merges and differences that come with a global market, and changes in both customer and employee needs and values (Rodríguez-Carvajal, Moreno-Jiménez, de Rivas-Hermosilla, Álvarez-Bejarano, & Sanz-Vergel, 2010). At the same time, there is an increasing demand for a more ethical peoplecentered management (van Dierendonck, 2011), a management that can combine the constant demand for efficiency and efficacy with a moral focus. Within this context, leadership has been pinpointed as a key factor to achieving committed workers as well as prosperous organizations (Luthans, 2002;van Dierendonck, 2011). In this line, servant leadership (SL) may play an important contribution in achieving those goals. At this respect, SL has been proposed as a leadership style specifically focused on people and their development (Greenleaf, 1977). Greenleaf described a servant leader as follows: "The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead." (Spears, 1998, p. 1). Therefore, a servant leader is one who is mainly concerned about his followers (Greenleaf, 1977). In contrast to other leadership theories as for example transformational leadership, inspiring leadership or Level 5 leadership, SL makes explicit the moral and social concerns and it sets first followers´ needs even over organizational goals (Hunter et al., 2013, van Dierendonck, 2011. In its application, this leadership has been observed to be related to effective performance, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, commitment and the appearance of organizational trust climate, among others (e.g. Hunter et al., 2013; van Dierendonck, 2010, for a review).Based on its value, the global context brings also the challenge of studying SL within a cross-cultural setting so that attention for possible culture differences should be brought to the front (Mooij & Hofstede, 2010 Abstract. Servant Leadership emphasizes employee's development and growth within a context of moral and social concern. Nowadays, this management change towards workers´ wellbeing is highlighted as an important issue. The aims of this paper are to adapt to Spanish speakers the Servant Leadership Survey (SLS) by van Dierendonck and Nuijten (2011), and to analyze its factorial validity through confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance in three countries. A sample of 638 working people from three Spanish-speaking countries (Spain, Argentina and Me...

The Cross-Cultural Invariance of the Servant Leadership Survey: A Comparative Study across Eight Countries

“…The partial invariance of the measurement invariance model confirms the findings of factorial validity of the separate samples combined into our composite sample, as shown in recent articles [22][23][24]26]. Both the factorial structure and the individual item loadings are similar across most countries and languages.…”

“…For the SLS, this level has already been confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis for the eight-dimensional structure in the survey version for the Netherlands and the UK [8], Finland [22], Italy [23], Germany [24], Portugal [25], Spain, Argentina and Mexico [26]. In the present research, we will test the configural equivalence of the instrument in eight European countries simultaneously, which we expect to be stable.…”

“…811 persons from The Netherlands from a diverse range of occupations (40% women; age 40.8, SD = 10.5), 753 persons from Italy from a diverse range of sectors, mainly profit (48% women; age = 38.7, SD = 10.2) [23], 491 judges from Finland working at the general courts (51% women; age = 50.6, SD= 10.8) [22], 395 people from Germany working in a broad range of sectors, both profit and non-profit (47% women; age = 37.3, SD = 10.8), 337 persons from Turkey working in the automotive and textile industry (34% women, age = 33.3, SD = 8.8) [28], and 258 persons from Spain from diverse work settings (53% women, age = 32.6, SD = 8.5) [26].…”

Propriedades Psicométricas da Escala de Liderança Servidora

“…O líder servidor admite, portanto, que ele pode se beneficiar da experiência dos outros. A autenticidade, por sua vez, está relacionada à expressão do "verdadeiro eu", de modo consistente com os pensamentos e sentimentos internos, isto é, à fidelidade consigo mesmo, como forma de representar com precisão as próprias intenções (Harter, 2002;Peterson & Seligman, 2004).…”

Psychometric properties of the human system audit-transformational leadership short scale in Germany and Philippines: A cross-cultural study

“…With the globalization and growing number of companies that decided to implement an internationalization strategy and to expand their business to different countries (Dean & Ritzer, 2012), the need for cross-cultural collaboration and management became more important (Shi & Wang, 2001) and, along, expatriation of managers increased (Larsen, 2004). Following Scandura and Dorfman (2004), research on crosscultural validation of instruments to screen leadership in globalized business' is still scarce and even today needed as some recent studies validated other leadership styles like identity (Dick et al, 2018), ethical (Zhu, Zheng, He, Wang, & Zhang, 2017) and servant leadership (Rodríguez-Cavajal, de Rivas, Herrero, Moreno-Jiménez, & vam Dierendonck, 2014), but not short transformational leadership screening instruments.…”