Serve Me, Serve My Coworkers: Servant Leadership

Transcription

Serve Me, Serve My Coworkers: Servant Leadership
Serve Me, Serve My Coworkers: Servant Leadership,
Identification with the Leader and Employee Helping
Behavior
Groups have been widely used in contemporary organizations to organize work. In workgroups,
employees need to help and coordinate with each other in order to accomplish goals.
Theoretically speaking, servant leadership holds the potential in boosting employee helping
behavior. In this study, Dr. Sandy Wayne, Dr. Robert Liden, and Junfeng Wu sought to
understand how and when servant leadership leads to employee helping behavior. Specifically,
we examined how two sources of servant leadership experiences, i.e., one’s own experienced
servant leadership and coworkers’ experienced servant leadership, impact employees.
We collected data from 260 employees in 43 intact groups in a Fortune 500 company in China.
To recap, we found:
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Employees tend to identify with servant leaders if they are served by servant leaders;
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Moreover, employees also observe how servant leaders treat their coworkers. And, if
they found that leaders display servant leadership behaviors to their coworkers as well,
they tend to more identify with the leader;
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When employees identity with the servant leader, they are likely to engage in helping
behavior.
Implications of the Results:
Our findings indicate that servant leadership is an effective leadership approach that may
increase employee identification with the leader and helping behavior. For managers who want
to nurture employee identification and promote employee helping, displaying servant
leadership to the followers could be a promising approach. In addition, given that employees
are more likely to identify with the leader when they found that the leader displays servant
leadership behaviors toward them as well as toward their coworkers, managers should pay
attention to all the followers’ needs and desires and provide support and guidance to all the
followers.