Servant Leadership and Employee Engagement: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Servant Leadership is a holistic approach whereby leaders act with morality, showing great concern for the company’s stakeholders and engaging followers in multiple dimensions, such as emotional, relational and ethical, to bring out their full potential and empower them to grow into what they are capable of becoming. Servant leadership has been linked through various mediators to positive individual and collective outcomes, including behavioral, attitudinal, and performance. Among follower attitudinal outcomes, the present study aims at deepening the relationship between servant leadership and employee engagement in a large Italian consulting firm; first, by assessing the implementation of a servant leadership approach through a survey based on SL-7; second, by qualitatively investigating the servant leadership experiences lived by junior employees and their influence on individual engagement though a semi-structured questionnaire. The findings of the study suggest that employee engagement is positively influenced by servant leadership through various mediators, either leader-centered, such as empowerment, team-centered, such as team cohesion, organization-centered, such as positive organizational climate, job-centered, such as challenging tasks, and employee-centered, such as proactive personality. Some factors also emerged to hinder the relationship between servant leadership and employee engagement, particularly those related to the working environment: namely, high pressure, poor work-life balance and remote-working. The article also provides theoretical and practical implications and identifies potential areas for future research on servant leadership.

Factors Affecting Teachers’ Work Engagement: The Case of Private School Teachers in Jakarta Metropolitan, Indonesia

“…The teachers perceive that the leaders in the school make a real effort for the good of the members. It is in line with Canavesi and Minelli (2021) who explain that servant leaders also take a genuine interest in the lives of their members and even put personal interests aside to prioritize the progress of members. This kind of servant leadership is very much needed in the school environment to build a deeper meaning of work for educators, education staff, and students.…”

“…Moreover, research by Aboramadan and others (2020) also found that SL affected the WE of academic staff at 12 universities in Palestine. Canavesi and Minelli (2021) explain that leaders who serve their members can build trust because they have open communication, flexibility, and good relations between colleagues which encourage better WE. Therefore, it is suspected that SL in schools positively affects teachers' WE (SL→WE).…”

“…SL is an effort to put aside the leader's personal interests and instead emphasizes investing in building good relationships with organizational members to increase commitment, loyalty, and trust (Canavesi & Minelli, 2021). The involvement of members by the servant leader in the work encourages an increase in the usefulness of employees' work because meaningful work emphasizes the role of freedom, autonomy, and dignity (Yeoman, 2014), which is then believed to have an effect on WE as the results of research by Van Wingerden and Poell (2019).…”

“…The implementation of SL is carried out with leaders who focus on service to employees and have an attitude of serving others. The better SL in schools, the WE of teachers also increases in various school activities and also increases the ability and creativity of teachers in carrying out their duties (Canavesi & Minelli, 2021).…”

How servant leadership motivates young university teachers’ workplace well-being: The role of occupational commitment and risk perception

“…The characteristics of servant leadership were put forward by Dennis and Bocarnea (2005) , including humility, trust, empowerment, vision, and love for subordinates. Servant leadership can bring a series of positive results to employees, such as organizational citizenship behavior, employee engagement, performance, and so on ( Liden et al, 2014 ; Panaccio et al, 2015 ; Canavesi and Minelli, 2021 ).…”