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A meta-analytic review of the consequences of servant leadership: The moderating roles of cultural factors

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Abstract

The past decade has witnessed growing interests in empirically examining the effectiveness of servant leadership in management research. Our study reviews the literature on servant leadership and analyzes the relationship between servant leadership and its outcome variables. Drawing on social exchange theory, this study uses meta-analysis and find that servant leadership is positively related to followers’ job-related outcomes (e.g., psychological empowerment, organizational commitment, service quality), leader-related outcomes (e.g., leader effectiveness), and group-related outcomes (e.g., group service performance). Further, we find that the relationships between servant leadership and its outcomes are moderated by cultural factors (i.e., traditionality, masculinity, individualism, and power distance). Finally, we examine the incremental validity of servant leadership by taking transformational leadership into account and comparing their effects on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) via leader-member exchange (LMX). Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and an agenda for future research is proposed.

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Notes

  1. The Supplementary Materials, which contain both the meta-regression figures and references list used for studies included in the meta-analysis of the relationships between servant leadership and its consequences, for this article can be found online at: https://osf.io/pdm2g/?view_only=009d1c49b3dc472d8ffc767486e29889

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Funding

This study was funded by Young Scientists Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71602163 and 71802077), Young Scientists Fund from Ministry of Education in China Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. 16YJC630171), and Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71790593).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China

    Yucheng Zhang

  2. Business School, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Yuyan Zheng

  3. Business School, Hunan University, Changsha, China

    Long Zhang

  4. School of Business Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Qingyang, China

    Shan Xu

  5. Department of Organization and HR, Renmin Business School, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Xin Liu

  6. School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

    Wansi Chen

Authors
  1. Yucheng Zhang
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  2. Yuyan Zheng
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  3. Long Zhang
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  4. Shan Xu
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  5. Xin Liu
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  6. Wansi Chen
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Correspondence to Long Zhang.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 3 Results of one-sample removed analysis
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Appendix 2

Table 4 Sample characteristics for primary studies included in the meta-analysis
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Zhang, Y., Zheng, Y., Zhang, L. et al. A meta-analytic review of the consequences of servant leadership: The moderating roles of cultural factors. Asia Pac J Manag 38, 371–400 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-018-9639-z

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