Servant Leadership and Goal Attainment Through Meaningful Life and Vitality: A Diary Study

Abstract

Despite the emphasis of servant leadership theory on the attention provided to workers' needs and goals, there is a lack of empirical knowledge on the relationship between servant leadership and employees' goal attainment. We provide a theoretical model of the mechanism by which this strong focus of servant leadership on a worker's individual development positively influences the worker's goal attainment. Through a diary study with 126 workers over five consecutive working days, the results indicated a positive within-person indirect effect of servant leader behaviors on goal attainment a day later through two parallel paths: the meaning in life at night and vitality the next morning. These results provide the first empirical support for the assumption of servant leadership as a promoter of employees' goals, and highlights how servant leadership positively influences the integration of work as part of life and the energy resources of workers to achieve their daily goals.

Facilitating Eudaimonic Well-Being in Mental Health Care Organizations: The Role of Servant Leadership and Workplace Civility Climate

“…Mental health care workers who experienced high levels of EWB also reported higher levels of task performance, innovative work behavior, and work engagement. In line with other findings [54], this study suggests a spill-over effect of work-related relational and contextual factors influencing domain-free EWB, which spirals back into positive effects within the work domain, particularly in the form of work engagement and task performance. This provides further evidence for the value of enhancing domain-free EWB within a work context as it not only benefits work-related outcomes, such as performance and work engagement, but it also contributes to the societal benefit by, alongside hedonic well-being, enhancing eudaimonic components of full functioning, psychological well-being across domains [78].…”

“…In a work setting, leadership could be seen as a resource falling in the category of contextual social support. The positive relationship between perceived supervisor support [51], transformational leadership [52], leader's spiritual values [53], and EWB suggests that leaders who model serving behaviors, meaningful work, and the use of individual strengths [54] could shape EWB for health care workers. Servant leadership is recognized as a leadership style which benefits organizations, and society, through its focus on valuing, developing, and engaging employees in an authentic way [55].…”

How Servant Leadership Motivates Innovative Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…This effort extends previous studies that have shown mediating influences played by motivational [ 22 , 23 , 24 ], cognitive [ 25 , 26 ], and identification-based mechanisms [ 13 ]. Secondly, the boundary conditions about servant leadership largely focus on employee-centered moderators [ 23 , 27 , 28 ] or organization-centered moderators [ 29 , 30 , 31 ]. This study focuses on LMX to shed light on the leader–follower relationship as a potential moderator.…”

How Servant Leadership Leads to Employees’ Customer-Oriented Behavior in the Service Industry? A Dual-Mechanism Model

“…Employee vitality has received considerable attention in researching the influence of leadership styles and employee outcomes, especially the impact of servant leadership [15,40]. It can be generally defined as an affective component of thriving that refers to individuals' positive and affective feelings of energy, aliveness, and function [13].…”