Abstract
One of the enduring images of Christianity is that of Christ as the good shepherd, which is a relevant metaphor for servant leadership’s emphasis on promoting the holistic well-being of employees, clients, and customers. Hence, employee well-being is a global construct that reflects the overall physical, mental, and spiritual health of employees (Roberts, Working with Christian servant leader spiritual intelligence: the foundation of God honoring vocational success. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Servant leadership emphasizes two meta dimensions of stewardship and servanthood that directly promote employee well-being (Roberts, Christian scripture and human resource management: building a path to servant leadership through faith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). This chapter will review a large sample of servant leader empirical studies and present clear evidence of its efficacious influence on employee well-being. The research literature and subsequent analysis for this chapter is based upon 138 servant leader empirical studies published from 2004 to 2019. Well-being studies were then selected from this group of 138 by keyword search in the respective article abstracts. In addition, studies of closely related well-being variables such as employee thriving, work and family enrichment, work and family conflict, ethical and moral work climate, a positive work climate, and burnout were grouped with the well-being studies. A total of 22 well-being related studies were identified through this process. The 138 studies generated 285 empirical outcomes of which 275 (96.5%) are favorable in directionality regarding the influence of servant leadership on well-being–related outcomes. There were only 9 nonsignificant (3.3%) and 1 negative (0.35%) relationships identified. Of the 138 studies, a final grouping of 129 studies was selected for the final analysis through the elimination of non-well-being–related dependent variables.
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Roberts, G. (2021). Fostering Workplace Well-Being Through Servant Leadership. In: Dhiman, S.K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30025-8_9
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