Linking servant leadership to individual performance: Differentiating the mediating role of autonomy, competence and relatedness need satisfaction
Introduction
In the last decade, in response to recent challenges for leadership, an emerging stream of academic studies has focused on leadership types rooted in ethical, pro-social or people-centered behaviors, and in particular on servant leadership (van Dierendonck, 2011). Servant leadership is characterized by a focus on followers' growth and empowerment, and on leaders' altruism, empathy, sense of ethics and community stewardship (Greenleaf, 1977, Liden et al., 2008). Compared with related leadership styles, servant leadership is unique in that the leader is viewed as a ‘servant’ attending to followers' needs (van Dierendonck, 2011). Servant leadership's central premise is that servant leaders influence organizational outcomes by fostering followers' growth and well-being, specifically through the process of satisfying followers' needs (Liden et al., 2008, Mayer, 2010). Servant leadership research is still in its early stages and to gain legitimacy as a mainstream leadership theory, research must clarify the processes explaining how a leadership style with such an explicit focus on followers' needs and inducing positive individual outcomes can help achieve organizational objectives (Mayer, 2010). The purpose of this article is to address this challenge.
Although the concept of servant leader was introduced in the 1970s in Greenleaf's seminal essays, it is only in the last decade that empirical studies have started to define this construct and develop psychometrically sound measures (e.g., Ehrhart, 2004, Liden et al., 2008, van Dierendonck and Nuijten, 2011). Empirical studies have begun to contribute to our understanding of the impact of servant leadership on employees' attitudes and behaviors. Research has found support for a relationship between servant leadership and important outcomes such as job satisfaction (Barbuto and Wheeler, 2006, Mayer et al., 2008); organizational commitment (Liden et al., 2008); follower disengagement and turnover intentions (Hunter et al., 2013); creative behaviors (Neubert, Kacmar, Carlson, Chonko, & Roberts, 2008); and task performance or organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) (e.g., Ehrhart, 2004, Hu and Liden, 2011, Schaubroeck et al., 2011).
While researchers are beginning to find support for the relationship between servant leadership and individual task performance or OCBs (Liden et al., 2008, Neubert et al., 2008), little is known about the mechanisms that could explain the link between these variables (Liden, Panaccio, Meuser, Hu, & Wayne, 2014). Although a handful of studies have shown servant leaders' relationships to task performance or OCBs to be mediated by mechanisms such as promotion focus (Neubert et al., 2008) and procedural justice climate (Ehrhart, 2004), research has yet to explore the intra-psychological processes presumably underlying some of these mechanisms and favorably influencing performance-related behaviors. Further, no studies have examined yet the mediating links between servant leadership and the three components of individual job performance concurrently: employee task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors toward specific individuals (OCB-I) and organizational citizenship behaviors that benefit the organization in general (OCB-O). Distinguishing these three performance constructs is important because prior research has clearly demonstrated that these three components of performance can have different antecedents (Motowidlo and Van Scotter, 1994, Organ and Konovsky, 1989, Smith et al., 1983, Williams and Anderson, 1991) and different consequences (e.g., Van Scotter, Motowidlo, & Cross, 2000).
Thus, the present work explicitly proposes to deepen our understanding of the servant leadership model by exploring and refining our comprehension of the distinctiveness of this model: servant leaders' focus on satisfying followers' needs as the underlying psychological mechanism to enhance individual performance. The concept of need satisfaction has a long history in social psychology (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and in work and organizational psychology (Gagné, 2003, Latham and Budworth, 2006). Among the various human need theories (e.g., Maslow, 1943, Murray, 1938), Self-Determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985) is one of the most established in the work field. In contrast to early need theories, SDT does not rely on need hierarchies (Alderfer, 1972, Maslow, 1943, Murray, 1938) or drive hypotheses (Adler, 1964, Freud, 1961, Jung, 1959). SDT postulates an innate and universal tendency of organisms to develop by integrating their experiences into a coherent sense of self (Ryan, 1995). More specifically, SDT posits that individuals are naturally active, curious and interested, and that fulfilling their innate psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness is deemed essential for effective functioning and for actualizing their full potential and growth (Ryan & Deci, 2002). Because one distinguishing and fundamental characteristic of the servant leader is the explicit focus of the servant leader's attention on followers' need satisfaction, research should expect to find a link between servant leadership and satisfaction of employees' specific basic psychological needs. So far, two empirical studies have investigated this link, but regrettably, both have gone no further than establishing a link between servant leadership and overall need satisfaction (Mayer et al., 2008, Van Dierendonck et al., 2014), an aggregate of the three basic psychological needs. First, Mayer et al. (2008) found that servant leadership was only related to overall need satisfaction through the mediating effect of justice perception, and that servant leadership did not directly predict overall need satisfaction. Second, Van Dierendonck et al.'s field study showed a strong direct link between servant leadership and overall psychological need satisfaction (β = .60, p < .001). Notably, none of these two studies attempted to predict an effect on employee performance and all variables were self-reported, thus increasing the risk of common-rater bias. Hence, although these studies do provide a preliminary demonstration of the existence of the expected link between servant leadership and satisfaction of employees' needs, there is a need for empirical research to dig beyond this global link and further investigate what we still do not know about servant leadership: which of employees' specific and distinct basic psychological needs are satisfied by servant leadership, and what impact does satisfaction of each need have on employees' performance?
By investigating how servant leadership is linked to employees' performance through the mediating effects of satisfaction of the three basic psychological needs, the current study aims to contribute to the servant leadership literature and SDT literature in several ways. First, this study is the first that aims to support servant leadership's central premise that servant leaders influence organizational outcomes through the process of satisfying followers' needs. Second, it proposes to advance our knowledge of servant leadership's unique feature of servicing followers' needs, because contrary to previous studies, we distinguish the three needs and we propose how servant leaders help satisfy each need and in turn demonstrate the unique contribution of each form of need satisfaction in predicting specific individual performance components. Third, this study intends to contribute to the SDT literature by developing one of its basic theoretical assumptions, namely that satisfaction of each of the three psychological needs — for autonomy, competence and relatedness — possesses different and unique explanatory powers in predicting three critical individual performance outcomes: task performance, OCB-I and OCB-O. Fourth, as a side contribution, this study brings additional empirical support to the job performance literature by continuing to demonstrate the distinction between task performance and OCBs. Globally, this study contributes to theoretical development by integrating the servant leadership literature into the SDT and performance literature, and should help servant leadership gain legitimacy as an important and relevant leadership theory. Additionally, from a practical standpoint, linking servant leadership to performance outcomes through followers' need satisfaction would be useful to managers who want to become more effective servant leaders. Understanding which specific followers' needs servant leaders would need to fulfill to be effective could be useful in the training, selecting, hiring or promoting processes of servant leaders, and would benefit followers by contributing to the actualization of their growth and potential.
Section snippets
Servant leadership
In his seminal essays, Greenleaf, 1977, Greenleaf, 1998 describes servant leadership not as a management technique but a way of life, which starts with a “natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first” (p.14). By conscious choice, one then aspires to lead, while embodying ethical imperatives and a deep commitment to put one's subordinates' “highest priority needs” before one's own. Greenleaf articulates his vision of how servant leaders act as role models, inspire trust, and
Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory (SDT) is a general theory of human motivation that has been applied successfully to investigate and predict human behavior in several domains, such as education, health, sports and organizations (for a review see Vansteenkiste, Niemiec, & Soenens, 2010). To explain how SDT could support servant leadership's effects in a working environment, we present the fundamental premises of the organismic-dialectical metatheory underlying SDT (Deci and Ryan, 2000, Vansteenkiste
Servant leadership and SDT's basic psychological need satisfaction
We contend in this study that servant leaders' distinctive focus on meeting followers' needs will naturally lead them to recognize SDT's three distinct basic psychological needs and contribute to their fulfillment. In line with SDT's framework, as leaders are considered an integral part of followers' organizational context and play a central role in the construction of an individual's work experiences, they are pivotal in providing the necessary conditions to support satisfaction of basic
Job performance and basic psychological need satisfaction
Task performance, organizational citizenship performance targeted toward individuals (OCB-I) and organizational citizenship performance targeted toward the organization (OCB-O) are three critical dimensions of job performance that have been a prominent domain of investigation for decades because of their undeniable but distinct contribution to organizational goal achievement (Borman and Motowidlo, 1997, Motowidlo et al., 1997). Task performance typically refers to the category of behaviors
Basic psychological need satisfaction mediates servant leadership's effects on performance
The above hypotheses combine to form a mediation model. We propose that servant leaders possess the characteristics that are likely to increase task performance and OCB performance via their influence on each of the three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Consistent with social exchange theory (Blau, 1964, Eisenberger et al., 1986) and the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), which holds that the receipt of benefits incurs an obligation to repay the donor,
Sample and procedures
The study was conducted in a large company based in Canada that designs and produces high technology products, and which has over 3000 employees in North America. It was announced on the company's local intranet, and management sent a letter to each employee to encourage participation. Human resources representatives provided us with work e-mail addresses for all employees. We sent an electronic message with a link to the web-based survey inviting 2508 first-level employees to fill in the team
Measurement model and descriptive statistics
In preliminary analyses we tested a measurement model with all seven latent variables related to their respective indicators. This seven-factor measurement model fits the data well with χ2 (634) = 962.852, CFI = .93, TLI = .92, RMSEA = .046 and SRMR = .059 (Hu & Bentler, 1999).1
Discussion
This study was designed to advance our understanding of the fairly young servant leadership research domain, and to specifically investigate servant leadership's unmapped central premise that servant leaders influence organizational outcomes by fostering followers' growth and well-being, specifically by the process of satisfying followers' needs (Liden et al., 2008, Mayer, 2010). Our goal was to examine in a representative working environment, how servant leadership could influence performance,
Conclusion
Leadership continues to be an exciting focus of research given that leaders bear the responsibility for influencing their employees' adoption of evolving organizational values, attitudes and goals. Yet with the increase in distrust in leaders in our political and corporate worlds, it is timely and stimulating to focus on a form of leadership that is not power-driven and self-serving. Indeed, servant leadership is a form of leadership unique in its explicit people-centered focus on attending to
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