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Explains that servant‐leadership is a leadership term and philosophy which was originated by Robert K. Greenleaf, and which puts serving the greater needs of others as the primary goal of leadership. In a ground‐breaking 1970 essay, entitled The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf suggested how caring for our many institutions, and each other, can occur through the practice of servant‐leadership. In the 1980s and 1990s servant‐leadership has become a major focus and goal in leadership and management writings, and in organizational practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide leadership studies educators with a resource to examine the work of a leader who displays characteristics of servant leadership. The lesson allows students to study a modern servant leader by examining their work on a specific issue and how their efforts resulted in significant change in an area of human rights. Using a YouTube video for this lesson makes this a teaching tool that can be implemented in face-to-face class meetings or online learning environments.

This study is undertaken to explain how servant leadership affects employees’ service performance through their felt obligation toward their leaders. Furthermore, the study explores how the relationship between felt obligation and service performance is moderated by performance pressure.

The data were collected from 312 manager–subordinate dyads working in private sector hospitals of Karachi. The data were analyzed through covariance-based structural equation modeling.

The study found that employees’ performance is affected by servant leadership and felt obligation toward managers. Furthermore, the study found that felt obligation toward leader mediates the relationship between servant leadership and employees’ performance. Finally, the study found that the relationship between felt obligation toward leader and employees’ performance was not contingent upon perceived performance pressure.

The study confirms the mediating role of felt obligation toward leaders linking servant leadership to employees’ service performance. The study also tests the moderating role of performance pressure influencing the relationship between relationship between felt obligation toward leaders and employees' service performance.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the role of servant leadership in promoting employees’ engagement in learning activities. Additionally, the study is intended to explicate the mediating role of employees’ promotion focus relating servant leadership to employees’ engagement in learning activities.

Data was collected from 401 manager–subordinate dyads employed in the Pakistani software industry located in Karachi in two phases which were conducted two months apart. The data analysis was done through hierarchical regression.

The study found that servant leadership was related to promotion focus and employees’ learning engagement. The study also found promotion focus was related to employees’ learning engagement. Finally, the results revealed promotion focus mediates the relationship between servant leadership and employees’ learning engagement.

The study unearthed the previously unexplored role of servant leadership in affecting employees’ engagement in learning activities. Additionally, the study explicated how servant leadership affects employees’ promotion focus to motivate employees’ learning engagement.

This article verified the construct of servant leadership and validated a measure developed in Western culture. Results from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N=285) produced a five-factor model – altruistic calling, emotional healing, persuasive mapping, wisdom, and community stewardship with less items than the original measure. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N=304) indicated that the 5-factor servant leadership model fits the data best. Correlation analysis of the supervisor-subordinate paired sample (N=209 dyads) showed that servant leadership has more common features with transformational leadership and less with paternalistic leadership; the predictive power of servant leadership was roughly equivalent to that of transformational leadership but higher than that of paternalistic leadership when predicting criterion variables such as overall satisfaction and deviance behavior. Our results totally demonstrated that the revised servant leadership scale in Chinese culture has higher reliability and validity, which could be used for subsequent studies as an effective instrument.

Employee burnout is increasingly coming under attention due to its negative impact on employee well-being and organisational effectiveness. This study, a systematic review, aims to evaluate the role of servant leadership and its mediators in preventing and mitigating against burnout experiences in organisations.

A preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analyses (PRISMA) was conducted using three databases, Academic search Complete, Embase and Scopus, in addition to bibliography searches. Articles were included if they reported on primary data, in English from inception to 2023. The mixed methods critical appraisal tool was used to assess the quality of articles, and a narrative synthesis was used to report results.

The search strategy yielded 4,045 articles, of which (N = 17), with total sample size of (N = 10,444) are included. Findings suggest that servant leadership is predictive of burnout, and that several mediators impact this relationship. Most studies were conducted in health care (n = 8) and banking (n = 3), and while the quality of the studies was mostly high (64%), the methods used were mainly descriptive and cross-sectional, which limits the extent to which causality can be inferred. A theory of change is provided based on the findings from this review and integrated with the extant literature on servant leadership theory, and can be used by organisations to support the policy, training and practice of servant leadership to reduce burnout.

Servant leadership is predictive of burnout; however, further research needs to be undertaken in this important emerging area.

In the era of the service economy, the personalized needs of customers are increasing rapidly. It often occurs that front-line employees bend organizational rules to help customers. The study sought to explore the influence mechanism of servant leadership on specific dimensions of customer-oriented deviance from the manager’s perspective, examine the mediating role of psychological security, and the moderating role of error management climate in the process.

We conducted an online survey study in China from April 10 to 29, 2023. We use online survey questionnaire technique and random sampling method for data collection. The authors collected 385 questionnaires from China and tested the model by SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0.

The results show that servant leadership significantly promotes employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors, psychological security plays a mediating role between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors, and error management climate has a positive moderating effect between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

This study explores the influence mechanism of servant leadership on deviant customer-oriented behaviors. The results of this study not only enrich the theoretical research on the formation mechanism of deviant customer-oriented behaviors but also provide a reference for leaders to correctly view and effectively manage employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to understand how servant leadership affects employees’ community citizenship behavior by transforming their servant identity. Additionally, the study explicated whether the relationship between servant leadership and employees’ servant identity is contingent on leader–follower value congruence.

For this study data was collected from 468 employees working in the service industry in three waves which were undertaken with a lag of one month. The collected data was analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results revealed that servant leadership is related to employees’ servant identity. The findings also substantiated the relationship between employees’ servant identity and their community citizenship behavior. The mediating role of servant identity linking servant leadership to employees’ community citizenship behavior was confirmed. Finally, leader–follower value congruence was found to moderate the relationship between servant leadership and employees’ servant identity.

The study is the first to ascertain the mediating role of servant identity linking servant leadership to employees’ community citizenship behavior. It is also the first study to ascertain that the effect of servant leadership on employees’ servant identity is contingent upon leader–follower value congruence.

In the previous chapter, I introduced trauma-informed care as an approach to organisational change and a shift in culture to recognise that many employees and people attending services have past trauma experiences. In this chapter, I recast servant leadership (SL) as a trauma-informed leadership model that naturally operationalises some of the principles discussed in the TIA literature. The first section of this chapter addresses the societal need for a more ethical and moral leadership approach, before briefly outlining the prevalence of trauma experienced by service users and employees. The next section provides an overview and definition of SL in a general sense, before articulating a trauma-informed model of SL and its characteristics. Finally, some of the outcomes associated with SL are discussed with a key focus on how this approach operationalises the principle of psychological safety, trust and empowerment found in trauma-informed approaches, as they relate to employees.

This chapter presents the origin of the theoretical framework of servant leadership proposed by Robert Greenleaf. This brief history is followed up by an examination of empirical studies on the key elements of a servant leader and a conceptual model of servant leadership. In addition, this chapter explores the effectiveness of servant leadership in various international contexts based on the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Programs (GLOBE) humane construct. Finally, the authors use continuous improvements programs as a process to analyze how servant leadership may help the successful implementation of continuous change.