How and when servant leadership enhances life satisfaction
| Date | 06 August 2018 |
| Published date | 06 August 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-07-2017-0223 |
| Pages | 1077-1093 |
| Author | Yanping Li,Diwan Li,Yidong Tu,Jie Liu |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
How and when servant leadership
enhances life satisfaction
Yanping Li
Department of Business Administration,
Economics and Management School of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Diwan Li
Department of Business Administration, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Yidong Tu
School of Economics and Management, Department of Business Administration,
Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, and
Jie Liu
Department of Political Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing City, China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between servant leadership and life
satisfaction through the mediating role of workplace positive affect (WPA), and the moderating roles of
collectivistic orientation and general self-efficacy.
Design/methodology/approach –Using a sample of 304 employees in a two-wave survey, the hypotheses
were demonstrated with hierarchical regression analyses.
Findings –The results revealed that servant leadership was positively related to employee life satisfaction,
and WPA served as a mediator between them. Moreover, collectivistic orientation and general self-efficacy
moderated the relationship between servant leadership and WPA, and the indirect effectof servant leadership
on life satisfaction via WPA.
Research limitations/implications –The time-lagged research design of this study may limit the ability
to draw causal conclusions. Moreover, as this research was conducted in a Chinese context, the question of the
generalizability of our findings calls for more attention.
Practical implications –Leaders are encouraged to adopt the servant leadership style to facilitate
employee life satisfaction and organizations should select and recruit managers with servant leadership
qualities. Furthermore, because employees’collectivistic orientation and general self-efficacy moderate the
effects of servant leadership on followers’outcomes, managers need to take individual differences into
consideration when they implement managerial strategy.
Originality/value –This research contributed to a burgeoning stream of servant leadership literature by
investigating the functions of servant leadership in promoting life satisfaction, and exploring the affective
mechanism linking servant leadership and life satisfaction as well as the boundary conditions of collectivistic
orientation and general self-efficacy.
Keywords Quantitative, Servant leadership, Life satisfaction, General self-efficacy,
Collectivistic orientation, Workplace positive affect
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Subjective well-being (SWB), which is the ultimate pursuit for almost every living person
(Diener et al., 1998), has attracted an increasing level of attention in research
and management domains. From the positive organizational behavior perspective
(Wright, 2003), researchers devote to understand the organizational, team, and individual
factors that influence one’s SWB (Matthews et al., 2014; Ryan et al., 2010). Among
these factors, leadership is thought to be a significant antecedent for employee SWB
(Kelloway et al., 2013). However, the traditional and classic definition of leadership focuses
on how to influence employees to realize collective goals and achieve organizational
effectiveness (Yukl, 2010), while ignoring the function of shaping employee SWB.
Personnel Review
Vol. 47 No. 5, 2018
pp. 1077-1093
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-07-2017-0223
Received 28 July 2017
Revised 1 December 2017
Accepted 10 February 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
1077
Servant
leadership
enhances life
satisfaction
When rethinking the value of leadership, scholars realize that a leader should serve to
enhance both employees’performance and their well-being.
Life satisfaction, described as one’s cognitive, global assessment toward overall li fe
surroundings, is themost important indicator for understandingindividuals’SWB (Tsai, 2009).
Among many leadership styles, servant leadership, exerts a uthentic motivation, obligation,
and behavioral support for employees’pursuit of life satisfaction, which characterized as
focusing on the benefits of others (Ehrhart, 2004), manifests as a desire to serve and satisfy
followers, as well as emphasizing employees’needs, development, and well-being (Stone et al.,
2004). Existing research shows that servant leadership is positively related to employees’
satisfaction in work or family domains (Barbuto and Wheeler, 2006; Yang et al., 2018).
Unfortunately, direct evidence to reveal how and when servant leadership influences
employees’general satisfaction with life is still lacking. Therefore, the first aim was to explore
the positive link between servant leadership and emp loyees’life satisfaction.
The coretenet of servant leadership is consistent withChinese Confucianculture, and China
is an ideal context for exploring the effectiveness of servant leadership (Zhang et al., 2012;
Tang et al., 2016). Moreover, compared with people from a western cultural context who tend to
divide their life and work into two independent domains, Chinese employees usually expect
their supervisor and organizations to care about their life, thus, supervisors have a large
influence on e mployees’overall life domains (Zhang et al., 2012). Based on these two cultural
considerations, servant leadership in the Chinese context is expected to impact employees’life
satisfaction.
In addition, the underlying mechanism through which servant leadership influences life
satisfaction is unknown. Previous studies exploring the relationships between servant leadership
and domain satisfaction were mostly grounded in resource-based theoretical frameworks
(Li et al., 2017), such as conversation of resource theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and work-family
enrichment theory (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006). In these studies, they almost regarded
resources as the linkage between servant leadership and consequences (Tang et al., 2016;
Yang et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2012), which some scholars have criticized on the grounds that
“nearly anything good can be considered a resource”(Halbesleben et al., 2014, p. 1337), and there
is still little knowledge about how these resources were triggered and how these resources
benefit employee life. Through the lens of the broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998),
this study intends to unpack the resource-based process between servant leadership and
employee life satisfaction by conceptualizing workplace positive affect (WPA) as the mediator.
Third, little is known about the boundary conditions of the effectiveness of servant
leadershipand life satisfaction. Servantleadership, with roots in the socialinteraction between
a leader and their followers (van Dierendonck et al., 2014), and the effectiveness of servant
leadership is contingent on the differences between people. For example, Zhang et al. (2012)
suggested thatwork-family climate acted as a moderatorof the relationships between servant
leadership and follower organizational identification, and thus work-to-family enrichment.
However, the extent to which individual characteristics may influence the process through
which servant leadership affects overall life outcomes has rarely been examined. This study
focuses on both collectivistic orientation and general self-efficacy to capture these personal
differences and proposes that these two personal differences moderate the relationship
between servant leadership and employee life satisfaction. Collectivistic orientation refers to
the cultural values held by individuals regarding the extent to which a person defines
themselves as a member of a given group (Triandis, 1995). General self-efficacy refers to the
individuals’stable trait that governs their fundamental appraisal of their competence at
completing a given task (Liu and Hung, 2016). Taking into consideration the hypothesisthat
WPA mediates the relationship between servant leadership and life satisfaction, we further
substantiate that collectivisticorientation and general self-efficacy moderate themediation of
WPA in the relationship between servant leadership and life satisfaction.
1078
PR
47,5
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