Testing a Model of Servant Leadership\u27s Influence on Follower Outcomes: Exploring Mediation Effects of Follower Trust and Prosocial Identity

Servant leadership is beginning to emerge as a premier positive leadership approach in the 21st century. However, recent theoretical propositions detailing the process through which servant leadership impacts outcomes has not been tested. Using the JD-R framework, the present study investigates follower prosocial identity and follower trust as key mediators of the relationship between servant leadership and follower job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors, community citizenship behaviors, and turnover intentions. Research participants included 578 working adults recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) that responded to three surveys separated by approximately one month each. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling in Mplus 7.4. Overall, support was found for a majority of the study’s hypotheses. As expected, servant leadership had positive relationships with both follower trust and follower prosocial identity. Furthermore, follower trust and follower prosocial identity both mediated the relationships between servant leadership and outcomes. Unexpectedly, the specific indirect effect of servant leadership on community citizenship behaviors through follower trust was negative. Differential relationships between mediators and outcomes were also expected, such that follower trust would be more important for job attitudes, and follower prosocial identity will be more important for citizenship behaviors. The findings demonstrated that follower trust was indeed a stronger mediator than follower prosocial identity of the relationships between servant leadership and job attitudes. However, follower prosocial identity was not a stronger mediator than follower trust of the relationships between servant leadership and citizenship behaviors. In fact, follower trust was a stronger mediator of the relationship between servant leadership and community citizenship behaviors than follower prosocial identity. Implications of the present study, limitations, and future directions are discussed