Week 6 essay

See attached

Week 6 –

Assignment

: Examine Theories and Research on Leadership, Culture, and Change

Assignment

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

After reading the articles and completing Skill Builder 12, prepare a paper that presents an annotated bibliography for each required article. Follow these steps to complete your assignment, along with the Guidelines presented in Skill Builder 12:

· Begin with an introduction. State the purpose of the paper and explain why writing annotated bibliographies is an important skill.

· Prepare an annotated bibliography for each of the two articles presented in this week’s readings. Be sure to address the required elements in each annotated bibliography. Use the guidelines in Skill Builder 12 to organize your annotated bibliographies. Note: Please use only the two articles found in the Resources section; do not write an annotated bibliography on any external articles.

· Finish the paper with a conclusion or summary that links to the introduction.

· Be sure to include the references page since this is a requirement for annotated bibliographies.

Total Length: 3-4 pages, not including title and reference pages. Each annotated bibliography should not exceed one page.

Your paper should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

Transformational leadersh

development

Connecting psychological and behavioral
change

Claire Mason
Earth Science and Resource Engineering,

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation,
Brisbane, Australia

Mark Griffin
University of Western Australia, an

Sharon Parker
Business School, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate whether leaders whose transformational leadership
behavior improves after training exhibit different psychological reactions compared to leaders whose
leadership behavior does not improve.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors followed 56 leaders taking part in a transformational
leadership training program. Questionnaire measures of leaders’ self-efficacy, positive affect, perspective
taking, and transformational leadership behavior were obtained pre- and post-training.
Findings – Leaders whose self-efficacy, perspective taking and positive affect increased over the
training period also reported improvements in their transformational leadership behavior. In addition,
leaders whose positive affect increased were more likely to receive improved transformational
leadership behavior ratings from their supervisors, team members and peers.
Research limitations/implications – The study supports the proposition, derived from social
cognitive theory that change in transformational leadership behavior is related to change in leaders’
psychological attributes. Further research is required to establish the direction of this relationship
and whether leaders’ psychological reactions represent a means through which the effectiveness of
leadership interventions can be improved.
Practical implications – Leaders’ psychological reactions should be monitored and supported
during developmental interventions. Effective leadership training interventions are important not only
to achieve change in behavior, but to avoid negative psychological outcomes for leaders.
Originality/value – The study is unusual because it explores the relationship between leader
attributes and leadership behavior longitudinally, in a training context. The longitudinal analysis,
focussing on change in leaders’ psychological attributes, allowed us to explain more variance in
leaders’ reactions to training.

Keywords Self-efficacy, Transformational leadership behaviour, Perspective taking, Positive affect

Paper type Research paper

Annual corporate spending on leadership development has now reached $45 billion
(cf. Gomez, 2007). Unfortunately, research suggests that leadership training achieve

only modest effects (Burke and Day, 1986; Dvir et al., 2002; Frese et al., 2003; Hazucha
et al., 1993) with a sizeable number of leaders actually showing lower ratings of
leadership effectiveness after leadership training (Atwater et al., 1995; Hazucha et al.,
1993; Kluger and DeNisi, 1996; London and Smither, 1995; Spreitzer and Quinn, 1996).

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-7739.htm

Received 11 May 201

Revised 29 May 2012
Accepted 29 May 2012

Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
Vol. 35 No. 3, 2014
pp. 174-

194

r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0143-7739
DOI 10.1108/LODJ-05-2012-0063

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Thus, there is a need to better understand the processes through which training
interventions achieve change in leaders’ behavior.

Although researchers have begun identifying contextual factors and leader
characteristics that explain variation in leaders’ reactions to leadership interventions
(Avolio and Hannah, 2008; Eid et al., 2008; Hazucha et al., 1993; Hotho and Dowling,
2010; Smither et al., 2005), this research does not provide insight into the processes
through which change is actually achieved. Our study addresses this gap by exploring
whether leaders who show improvement in their leadership behavior exhibit different
psychological reactions compared to leaders whose leadership behavior does not
improve in response to training. This research has the potential to shed light on the
psychological mechanisms through which the effectiveness of training interventions
may be enhanced, and may reveal previously unrecognized psychological impacts
associated with leader development.

Bandura’s (1986, 1997, 2001) social cognitive theory provides a framework for
understanding the relationship between change in psychological attributes and change
in behavior. According to this framework, there is a triadic, bidirectional interaction
between personal characteristics, behavior, and the environment. Bandura (2001)
argued that sociostructural factors such as training interventions affect behavior
largely through their impact on psychological mechanisms of the self-system. From
this perspective, psychological changes which correlate with change in leadership
behavior may represent levers through which the effects of leadership interventions
can be strengthened. However, Bandura (1997) also suggests that changes in
leadership behavior will produce social outcomes and self-evaluations that that have a
psychological impact on leaders. Thus, there should be a reciprocal relationship
between change in leaders’ psychological attributes and change in their leadership
behavior.

We chose to explore the connection between psychological change and improvements
in leadership behavior within the transformational leadership approach.
Transformational leaders inspire followers to perform beyond expectations by
developing, intellectually stimulating, and inspiring followers to transcend their own
self-interests for a higher collective purpose, mission, or vision (Bass, 1985; Howell and
Avolio, 1993). Transformational leadership behaviors have been found to have a positive
effect on follower well-being (Barling et al., 1996), performance (Barling et al., 1996; Dvir
et al., 2002), safety climate (Mullen and Kelloway, 2009), and organizational citizenship
behavior (Monninghoff, 2008; Podsakoff et al., 1996; Purvanova et al., 2006), so they are
practically important. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that transformational
leadership behaviors can be fostered through training (Atwater et al., 1999; Barling et al.,
1996; Dvir et al., 2002; Kelloway et al., 2000). For this reason, transformational leadership
training offers a good environment within which to explore the connection between
change in leaders’ psychological attributes and improvements in their leadership
behavior.

Below, we present a review of the relevant literature and theoretical foundations for
our hypotheses. Special attention is devoted to the social cognitive framework and the
relationship between change in personal factors and change in behavior. We then
advance the specific hypotheses to be investigated.

Literature review and theoretical foundations
Although efficacy beliefs are central to social cognitive theory, Bandura (1986)
suggests that different personal attributes will be important for learning, depending on

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leadership

development

the domain of functioning that is being investigated. Below, we draw from both
social cognitive theory and transformational leadership theory to identify three
psychological attributes that should differentiate between leaders whose transformational
leadership behaviors are improved by training and those whose are not.

Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is particularly important for learning because it influences choice of
behavior, direction of effort, and performance (Bandura, 1986; Lent et al., 1987; Schaub
and Tokar, 2005). In their review of leadership self-efficacy, Hannah et al. (2008) argue
that belief in one’s capability as a leader will be necessary for effective performance
as a leader, given the complex and challenging nature of the leadership role. In the
context of transformational leadership, we believe leaders would need high self-efficacy
in order to challenge existing ways of doing things, generate confidence in an
organizational vision, and behave in a way that is congruent with internal values even
when there are strong pressures to do otherwise. Consequently, we identified change
in a leader’s belief in his or her capability to perform transformational leadership
behaviors as a likely predictor of change in transformational leadership behavior.

According to social cognitive theory, the relationship between self-efficacy and
performance is reciprocal, such that self-efficacy is also influenced by performance
attainments (Bandura, 1997). In the leadership literature, prior leadership experiences
have been found to predict leader efficacy (Amit et al., 2009; McCormick et al., 2002)
and both leader self-efficacy and transformational leadership behavior have been
found to improve through executive coaching (Baron and Morin, 2010; Finn et al.,
2007). Thus, we predicted that leaders who showed improvements in their self-efficacy
would also show improvements in their transformational leadership behavior. Our first
hypothesis was:

H1. The change in leaders’ self-efficacy from pre-training to post-training will
predict the change in leaders’ transformational leadership behavior from
pre-training to post-training.

Perspective taking
Perspective taking should also be important for the development of transformational
leadership behaviors. Perspective taking involves adopting another person’s viewpoint
(Parker and Axtell, 2001). In his analysis of leader psychological processes underlying
authentic transformational leadership, Sosik (2006) identifies perspective taking as
underlying many dimensions of transformational leadership. He argues that perspective
taking helps leaders to articulate a vision that appeals to followers, stimulate intellectual
engagement among followers, and show that they are considerate of the unique
perspectives that his or her followers and associates possess. Consistent with this view,
Gregory et al. (2011) found that leaders who engaged in more perspective taking toward
their subordinates were seen to engage in more transformational leadership behaviors by
the same subordinates.

We took this proposition further by arguing that greater use of perspective taking
may differentiate those leaders who are successful in developing transformational
leadership behaviors. Initially, perspective taking should support leader development
by making leaders aware of the need to change their leadership behaviors. Day (2000)
argues that 360-degree feedback interventions, which are commonly used to support
leadership development, raise awareness of how your leadership behavior is perceived

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and which aspects of your leadership style need modifying. However, perspective
taking should also inform the choice of new behaviors. In the terminology of social
cognitive theory, perspective taking will give the leader a better understanding of
the opportunities offered by the social system (Bandura, 1997, p. 6). Furthermore, being
tuned into followers’ emotions, motives, actions, and concerns should assist the leader
to determine whether new concepts and behaviors are achieving the desired outcomes
(Sosik, 2006), thereby assisting the leader to make “ongoing corrective adjustments”
during the learning process (Bandura, 1986). Thus, we predicted that:

H2. The change in leaders’ perspective taking from pre-training to post-training
will predict the change in leaders’ transformational leadership behavior from
pre-training to post-training.

Positive affect
The third psychological attribute we investigated was positive affect. Fredrickson’s
(1998, 2004) “broaden-and-build” theory suggests that leaders’ emotional reactions,
in particular, their positive affect, will be critical in supporting and sustaining their
developmental efforts. According to this theory, experiencing positive emotions
broadens people’s thought-action repertoires and enlarges their cognitive focus,
stimulating play, exploration and creativity and encouraging people to engage in a
wider range of thoughts and behaviors. These immediate effects associated with
positive affect eventually build more enduring personal resources through the
development of social bonds, self-insight, and knowledge. Thus, those leaders who
experience an improvement in their level of positive affect will be more likely to engage
cognitively with models of leadership behavior (e.g. in a training setting), experiment
with behaviors presented in the model, engage with others, and seek out the resources
that they need to support their ongoing development. These initial changes should
result in improved relationships and understanding which further strengthen the
leader’s positive affect.

Consistent with this theory, Spreitzer and Quinn (1996) found that the level
of positive affect experienced by participants in a transformational leadership
training program was related to quality of the change initiative they implemented
during the program. In contrast, leader cynicism about organizational change
(Bommer et al., 2004) has been shown to be negatively correlated with transformational
leadership behavior. Conversely, leaders who engage in more transformational
leadership behaviors are likely to experience more rewarding interactions with
others (Li and Hung, 2009) and thus experience more positive affect. We therefore
predicted that:

H3. The change in leaders’ positive affect from pre-training to post-training
will predict the change in leaders’ transformational leadership behavior from
pre-training to post-training.

Method
Participants
The study participants were middle- and senior-level leaders in an organization who
had either been invited (based on their level in the organization) or had submitted an
expression of interest to participate in a year-long leadership development program.
They were all employees of a public sector organization which specialized in the

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leadership
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provision of scientific services to other government departments. The functions
performed by these leaders ranged from laboratory management, to developing
practice and capability within a particular disciplinary area, to project management.
In all, 83 percent of the leaders who were invited to take part in the program chose to
participate, but due to attrition (mostly the result of people leaving the organization)
only 80 percent of the leaders who originally signed up actually completed the
program. The study data are based on the 56 leaders who completed the program. Of
these leaders, 40 were male and 16 were female. They ranged in age from 30 to 59
years, with the mean age being 47 years. Their organizational tenure ranged from one
to 18 years, the mean length of tenure being five years.

Procedure
The one-year transformational leadership training program commenced with a two
day workshop where leaders learnt about the transformational leadership model,
received 360-degree feedback assessing their transformational leadership behavior,
and practiced transformational leadership behaviors through experiential activities.
After this first workshop, leaders were invited to participate in executive coaching
(delivered in six fortnightly sessions) and were allocated funding to attend external
training that was relevant to their developmental needs. Three follow-up workshops
were also held during the year, where participants came together to focus on specific
leadership skills and share their experiences with the program. At the final workshop
(held at the end of the year) leaders received a second wave of 360-degree feedback,
which allowed them to assess their progress and update their developmental goals.
The comprehensive nature of the intervention meant that this program represented an
ideal opportunity to investigate the relationship between change in psychological
characteristics and change in leader behavior.

The training program was rolled out over two years, with 27 participants
completing the program in the first year, and the remaining 29 participants completing
the program in the second year. Change in leaders’ transformational leadership
behavior was assessed from the 360-degree feedback data, which were obtained
just prior to the commencement of the program and at the end of the one-year program.
The 360-degree feedback questionnaire was completed by the leader’s immediate
supervisor, at least five of the leader’s team members, two or more of the leader’s peers,
and the leaders themselves. The leader’s version of the questionnaire had an extra
section which contained the psychological measures and assessed demographic
characteristics (age, gender, tenure, and education level). Thus, leaders’ psychological
characteristics were assessed at roughly the same time as their transformational
leadership behavior.

The response rate for the pre-training survey was 100 percent for both leaders and
their supervisors, and the response rate for the post-training survey was 100 percent
for leaders and 90 percent for their supervisors. The response rate was 85 percent for
team members and 84 percent for peers in the pre-training survey, and 75 percent
for team members and 73 percent for peers in the post-training survey. To ascertain
whether there were any differences between leaders who completed the training
program in the first year and leaders who completed the program in the second year,
independent groups t-tests were used to compare the groups on the study measures.
The t-tests revealed no significant differences between the two groups for either
pre-training measures (self-rated transformational leadership, t¼0.40; supervisor-
rated transformational leadership, t¼�0.16; team-rated transformational leadership,

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t¼1.24; peer-rated transformational leadership, t¼0.80; self-efficacy, t¼0.51;
perspective taking, t¼0.54; positive affect t¼�0.05) or post-training measures
(self-rated transformational leadership, t¼0.23; supervisor-rated transformational
leadership, t¼�0.06; team-rated transformational leadership, t¼0.73; peer-rated
transformational leadership, t¼0.16; self-efficacy, t¼0.59; perspective taking,
t¼�0.05; positive affect, t¼0.95).

Measures
Transformational leadership behavior. The measure of transformational leadership
represented a composite of items from existing measures, chosen to suit the
organizational context. A facilitated workshop was carried out with representatives of
the organization who were asked to identify those leadership behaviors that made
leaders effective in the organization. This information was used to select items and
sub-dimensions from existing transformational leadership instruments. The final set
of items was derived from House’s (1998) charismatic and instrumental leadership
measures, Yukl’s Managerial Practices Survey (Yukl and Kim, 1998), and Podsakoff
et al.’s (1990) measures of transformational leadership behavior. All items were rated
on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1¼strongly disagree to 5¼strongly agree.
As the full 360-degree feedback measure consisted of 100 items, we used a factor
analysis to identify those items which loaded most strongly on their transformational
leadership sub-dimensions. However, in line with other researchers measuring
transformational leadership (e.g. Bono and Judge, 2003; Judge et al., 2006; Piccolo and
Colquitt, 2006; Schaubroeck et al., 2007; Tracey and Hinkin, 1998; Yammarino and
Dubinsky, 1994; Zhu et al., 2009), we treated the final set of items as indicators of a
general transformational leadership factor.

Leader self-efficacy. Leader self-efficacy was assessed using a ten-item scale
assessing the leader’s confidence that he or she could perform transactional and
transformational leadership behaviors. The items represented behaviors which varied
in their level of difficulty, as self-efficacy beliefs vary in terms of level as well as strength
(Bandura, 1982). The Likert scale ranged from 0¼ totally uncertain to 10¼ totally certain.
Two example items are: “In relation to the team you manage, how certain are you that
you can treat your team members as individuals, as well as members of a team?” and
“In relation to the team you manage, how certain are you that you can get team members
to think in new and innovative ways?” Finn et al. (2007) employed this measure and
reported that it had good internal reliability and discriminant validity.

Leader perspective taking. Perspective taking was measured using Parker and
Axtell’s (2001) situationally oriented measure of perspective taking. This measure
assesses the extent to which the perspective taker empathizes with the target
and makes positive attributions about the target’s behavior. Evidence shows that
perspective taking reliably results in the perspective taker making attributions for
others’ behavior that are more like those one would make for oneself (e.g. Galper, 1976;
Regan and Totten, 1975). An example item is “If my staff fall behind, it’s mostly due to
the tough circumstances they face.” The Likert scale ranged from 1¼strongly disagree
to 5¼strongly agree. Analyses conducted after the first wave of data collection
revealed that the scale reliability was rather low (a¼0.68), so an additional item
(“When my staff perform poorly at their task, it’s usually not through any fault of their
own”) was added to the scale for subsequent waves of data collection to provide better
coverage of the construct domain. Scale scores were calculated by averaging the
leader’s responses to the items that he or she completed.

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Leader positive affect. Leaders’ positive affect was assessed with five indicators
of positive affect taken from Hart et al.’s (1996) Occupational Positive and Negative
Affect Scale. The respondent is instructed to rate how often he or she felt “energized,”
“enthusiastic,” “proud,” “happy” and “delighted” over the past month, using a Likert
scale ranging from 1¼not at all to 5¼all the time. Griffin (2001) used these positive
and negative affect scales in his multi-level study of dispositions and work reactions,
and showed that they could be differentiated from dispositional measures of
extroversion and neuroticism. Whereas the original scale consisted of seven
positive affect items, we used the five most strongly loading items from the original
seven-item scale.

Analyses
As this study was concerned with understanding the association between change in
leaders’ psychological attributes and improvement in leadership behavior, our initial
analyses were designed to provide a picture of the changes exhibited by leaders on the
study variables. First, we carried out t-tests to test whether there was a consistent
pattern of change for the leaders in the sample. However, as the aim of this study
was to explain variability in leaders’ behavior change, we did not necessarily expect
to obtain significant results from these analyses. Next, we calculated change scores
(subtracting pre-training scores from post-training scores) and examined the
distribution of these change scores. In a normal sample, 5 percent of the change
scores should be one or more standard errors from the mean. For our sample of 56
leaders, we would only expect to see 1.5 leaders with change scores two standard
errors above the mean and 1.5 leaders with change scores two standard errors below
the mean. A higher number of leaders above or below the mean would therefore
indicate that the amount of change exhibited by leaders was higher than would be
expected if the changes observed were merely due to random error.

We then used a hierarchical regression analysis to examine whether change in
leaders’ behavior could be explained by the change in their psychological attributes.
The analysis was carried out in three steps. In the first step, the pre-training measure
of transformational leadership behavior was entered as a predictor of post-training
transformational leadership behavior. In the second step of the analysis, the
pre-training measure of the psychological attribute was entered into the analysis.
Finally, we entered the post-training measure of the psychological attribute to
investigate whether the unique variance on the post-training psychological measure
would explain unique variance in the post-training measure of leader behavior.

This analysis is equivalent to testing the correlation between change in the
psychological attribute and change in transformational

leadership behavior

(Cronbach and Furby, 1970). That is, by partialling out the variance in the post-
training measures that can be predicted from the pre-training measures, we can see
whether the change (or unique post-training variance) in the psychological measure is
associated with the change (or unique post-training variance) in the behavioral
measure.

Because our sample size was relatively small we elected to test each psychological
attribute in a separate analysis. As the study hypotheses were directional, we used
one-tailed significance tests to evaluate the significance of the hypothesized effects.
We carried out a power analysis (Cohen, 1988) to check that this approach would
provide adequate statistical power to detect a medium size effect, which according to
Cohen’s convention, we represented as f 2¼0.15. The power analysis revealed that our

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sample of 56 leaders gave us power¼0.90, or a 90 percent probability of correctly
rejecting the null hypothesis if a medium effect was present.

Before aggregating the team member and peer ratings of leader behavior, we
tested for within-group agreement and between-group variance. James et al.’s (1984)
rwg( J) statistic was used to measure within-group agreement; values above 0.70 on
this statistic represent acceptable levels of agreement. The mean rwg( J) values for
team members’, Mpre-training ¼0.98 (SDpre-training ¼0.02) and Mpost-training¼0.94
(SDpost-training¼0.14) and peers’ ratings Mpre-training¼0.97 (SDpre-training¼0.07) and
Mpost-training¼0.98 (SDpost-training¼0.09) of transformational leadership behavior
demonstrated high within-group agreement. Intraclass correlations (ICC) were also
calculated (using mean squares from an ANOVA) to check the proportion of
leader-level variance and the reliability of the aggregated data ( James, 1982). The
ICC(1) values were above the median level reported in the organizational literature
(cf. James, 1982), confirming that there was substantial leader-level variance in team
and peer ratings of transformational leadership behavior, ICC(1)team pre-training¼0.27;
ICC(1)team post-training ¼0.14; ICC(1)peer pre-training ¼0.17; ICC(1)peer post-training ¼0.44.
The ICC(2) values, ICC(2)team pre-training¼0.70; ICC(2)team post-training¼0.52; ICC(2)peer
pre-training¼0.25; ICC(2)peer post-training¼0.71, were not all above the recommended level
of 0.6 (Ostroff and Schmitt, 1983) but they represent moderate values for these
statistics (cf. Deal and Billings, 1996; Schneider et al., 1998) and overall, these checks
supported aggregation of the data.

Results
Correlations among measures
The correlations among the study measures are reported in Table I. There were only a
few significant correlations between measures of leaders’ demographic characteristics
and the study measures, and these were all weak. Self-ratings of transformational
leadership behavior did not correlate significantly with others’ ratings (supervisors,
team members and peers), but there were some significant correlations among the
supervisor, team and peer ratings. This difference between self-ratings and others’-
ratings of leadership behavior has been reported by other researchers (e.g. Atwater and
Brett, 2003; Harris and Schaubroeck, 1998), and illustrates the importance of considering
multiple raters in this type of research. Our next analyses were intended to provide more
insight into the nature of the changes that occurred.

Change over time
The paired samples t-tests (see Table II) provided the first analysis of leaders’ reactions
to training. There was a significant improvement in supervisor ratings of
transformational leadership behavior from pre-training to post-training, t(55)¼2.05,
po0.05; however, self-ratings, t(55)¼0.98, p40.05, team ratings, t(55)¼�0.04,
p40.05, and peer ratings, t(55)¼0.75, p40.05, did not show consistent improvement
from pre-training to post-training. Similarly, while there were significant effects for
leaders’ self-efficacy, t(55)¼2.34, po0.05, and perspective taking, t(55)¼1.96,
po0.05, with scores increasing from pre- to post-training, the change in leaders’
positive affect was not significant, t(55)¼1.07, p40.05.

A different perspective on leaders’ reactions was provided by examining the
distribution of leaders’ change scores (pre-training scores subtracted from post-training
scores). The distributions revealed that some leaders showed substantial decreases over
time on the study measures, some showed relatively stable profiles over time, and others

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Table I.

Correlations and internal
reliabilities for
study measures

182

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35,3

V
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Table I.

183

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showed substantial improvement over time. To understand whether this variability was
greater than would be expected if changes were merely due to random error, we counted
the number of leaders who were more than two standard errors above or below the mean
change score (see Table III). This analysis revealed that the change scores on all of
the measures were more variable than would be expected if change was random.
Furthermore, as would be expected, the mean change scores were all positive, with more
leaders exhibiting a high level of improvement rather than a high level of decline.
Nevertheless, there remained a relatively high level of variability in the change scores at
the negative end of the distribution, suggesting that the training intervention had had a
negative impact for some of the participants.

Hierarchical regression analyses
The hierarchical regression analyses were carried out to determine whether changes
on the psychological measures could be used to explain differences between leaders
in their transformational leadership development. The first analyses were run with
self-ratings of post-training transformational leadership as the criterion variable (see
Table IV). The key question was whether the post-training psychological measure would
explain significant variance in the post-training transformational leadership measure
after the variance explained by the pre-training measures had been taken into account.

Measures Pre-training M (SD) Post-training M (SD) t

Self-rated transformational leadership 3.97 4.05 0.98
(0.53) (0.46)

Supervisor-rated transformational leadership 3.75 3.88 2.05*
(0.62) (0.55)

Team-rated transformational leadership 3.59 3.58 �0.04
(0.48) (0.49)

Peer-rated transformational leadership 3.80 3.86 0.75
(0.41) (0.64)

Self-efficacy 6.91 7.25 2.34*
(1.19) (1.25)

Perspective taking 3.25 3.38 1.96*
(0.63) (0.60)

Positive affect 3.34 3.44 1.07
(0.53) (0.72)

Notes: n¼56. * po0.05

Table II.
Change in psychological
attributes and
transformational
leadership behavior

Measures n above 2 SEM n below 2 SEM

Self-rated transformational leadership 13 12
Supervisor-rated transformational leadership 15 4
Team-rated transformational leadership 17 18
Peer-rated transformational leadership 18 11
Self-efficacy 4 5
Perspective taking 5 2
Positive affect 7 5

Note: n¼56

Table III.
Number of leaders
exhibiting significant
improvement or decline

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We found a significant improvement in explanatory power for all three analyses,
self-efficacy, DR2¼0.29, F(1, 52)¼25.93, po0.001, perspective taking, DR2¼0.06,
F(1, 52)¼3.91, po0.05, and positive affect, DR2¼0.09, F(1, 52)¼5.29, po0.05.
That is, change on the psychological measures predicted change in self-ratings of
transformational leadership behavior.

However, the psychological measures did not have the same explanatory power
in the analyses predicting supervisor, team, and peer ratings of post-training
transformational leadership behavior. There was a consistent pattern of results
across supervisor, team, and peer ratings of transformational leadership behavior (see
Tables V-VII). Post-training positive affect explained unique variance in post-training
transformational leadership behavior in the analyses for all three groups: supervisors,
DR2¼0.06, F(1, 50)¼6.37, po0.01, team members, DR2¼0.05, F(1, 52)¼3.72,
po0.05, and peers, DR2¼0.06, F(1, 51)¼4.52, po0.05. However, the post-training
measure of leader self-efficacy did not add significant explanatory power in the
analyses, DR2¼0.02, F(1, 50)¼1.70, p40.05 (supervisor ratings), DR2 ¼0.01,
F(1, 52)¼0.99, p40.05 (team ratings), DR2¼0.04, F(1, 51)¼2.52, p40.05 (peer
ratings). Nor was the post-training measure of perspective taking significant in the
analyses, DR2¼0.00, F(1, 50)¼0.25, p40.05 (supervisor ratings), DR2 ¼0.00,
F(1, 52)¼0.00, p40.05 (team ratings), DR2¼0.00, F(1, 51)¼0.08, p40.05 (peer
ratings). It is worth noting that the pre-training psychological measures were not
significant in these analyses either. In other words, leaders’ self-efficacy, perspective

Predictors Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 DR2

Pre-training transformational leadership 0.26* 0.19 0.15 0.07*
Pre-training self-efficacy – 0.26* �0.13 0.06**
Post-training self-efficacy – – 0.67*** 0.29***
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.26* 0.26* 0.19 0.07*
Pre-training perspective taking – 0.13 �0.09 0.02
Post-training perspective taking – – 0.34* 0.06*
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.26* 0.26* 0.32* 0.07*
Pre-training positive affect – 0.04 �0.12 0.00
Post-training positive affect – – 0.33* 0.09*

Notes: n¼56. * po0.05; ** po0.01; *** po0.001

Table IV.
Standardized b weights

from the hierarchical
regression predicting

self-rated
transformational

leadership behavior
Predictors Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 DR2

Pre-training transformational leadership 0.67*** 0.67*** 0.65*** 0.45***
Pre-training self-efficacy – 0.14 0.04 0.02
Post-training self-efficacy – – 0.17 0.02
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.67*** 0.66*** 0.68*** 0.45***
Pre-training perspective taking – 0.14 0.18 0.02
Post-training perspective taking – – �0.07 0.00
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.67*** 0.67*** 0.66*** 0.45***
Pre-training positive affect – 0.00 �0.12 0.00
Post-training positive affect – – 0.28** 0.06**

Notes: n¼54. ** po0.01; *** po0.001

Table V.
Standardized b weights

from the hierarchical
regression predicting

supervisor-rated
transformational

leadership behavior

185

Transformational
leadership
development

taking and positive affect at the outset of training were not related to the extent
to which their transformational leadership behavior changed over the training period
(as rated by supervisors, team members, and peers).

Discussion
This study was informed by Bandura’s (1986, 1997, 2001) social cognitive framework,
which conceptualizes learning as a triadic reciprocal interaction involving personal,
behavioral, and environmental factors. The study is unique in that it illustrates the
interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors in a leadership development
context. That is, we found that leaders who were participating in a transformational
leadership development intervention exhibited both psychological and behavioral
reactions, and that these reactions were inter-related, such that leaders who experienced
more positive psychological reactions were also more likely to exhibit positive behavioral
reactions. Adopting this framework therefore reveals the importance of considering
leaders’ psychological well-being when attempting to promote change in leader behavior.

We found that change in positive affect was most reliably associated with change in
behavior. Two frameworks in the literature explain why positive affect is important for
learning. First, as discussed earlier, broaden-and-build theory suggests that positive
affect provides resources to support change by broadening one’s cognitive focus,
stimulating play and exploration, and facilitating social relationships (Fredrickson, 1998).
Intentional change theory (Boyatzis and Akrivou, 2006) provides further explanation

Predictors Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 DR2

Pre-training transformational leadership 0.56*** 0.58*** 0.55*** 0.32***
Pre-training self-efficacy – �0.13 �0.21 0.02
Post-training self-efficacy – – 0.14 0.01
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.56*** 0.57*** 0.57*** 0.32***
Pre-training perspective taking – 0.15 0.15 0.02
Post-training perspective taking – – �0.03 0.00
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.56*** 0.56*** 0.53*** 0.32***
Pre-training positive affect – �0.01 �0.11 0.00
Post-training positive affect – – 0.24* 0.05*

Notes: n¼56. * po0.05; *** po0.001

Table VI.
Standardized b weights
from the hierarchical
regression predicting
team-rated
transformational
leadership behavior

Predictors Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 DR2

Pre-training transformational leadership 0.52*** 0.51*** 0.50*** 0.27***
Pre-training self-efficacy – �0.01 �0.15 0.00
Post-training self-efficacy – – 0.24 0.04
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.52*** 0.52*** 0.52*** 0.27***
Pre-training perspective taking – 0.12 0.15 0.01
Post-training perspective taking – – �0.04 0.00
Pre-training transformational leadership 0.52*** 0.52*** 0.49*** 0.27***
Pre-training positive affect – �0.08 �0.19 0.01
Post-training positive affect – – 0.27* 0.06*

Notes: n¼55. * po0.05; *** po0.001

Table VII.
Standardized b weights
from the hierarchical
regression predicting peer-
rated transformational
leadership behavior

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35,3

of the role of positive affect in promoting change. According to this theory, positive
emotions not only support cognition, exploration and relationship-building, they
activate our ideal self – our conception of what we most aspire to be and become.
Once the ideal self is activated, it monitors and guides behavior and decisions to ensure
that they are consistent with our aspirations and values. It can also provoke a phase
change in the person’s change or adaptation process, leading to the articulation of a
personal vision. Concepts such as the ideal self, a personal vision, and behaving in a
manner that is consistent with one’s values are all very consistent with the transformational
leadership approach. Thus, the processes described in intentional change theory are likely
to be highly relevant for explaining change in transformational leadership behavior.

The above analysis focusses on the effect of change in psychological characteristics
on behavior, but in the social cognitive framework (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2001),
personal characteristics, behavior and the environment are reciprocally related.
The “broaden-and-build” and intentional change frameworks conceptualize positive
affect as a driver of change in behavior, but they also suggest that the psychological
resources that are built when people are in a positive mood will result in upward spirals
that further enhance people’s well-being (Boyatzis and Akrivou, 2006; Fredrickson,
2004). Within the realm of transformational leadership, these psychological resources
might include having a vision for the future and stronger relationships with team
members. Thus, the observed relationship between change in positive affect and
change in transformational leadership will reflect the effect of the leader’s behavior
and environment on his or her positive affect as well as the effect of the leader’s affect
on his or her behavior and environment.

While our findings for positive affect integrate well with existing theories in the
literature, the relatively weak findings for self-efficacy need explanation, given that
both social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2001) and intentional change theory
(Boyatzis and Akrivou, 2006) identify self-efficacy as important for learning and
change. The analyses based on self-ratings of transformational leadership behavior
were actually consistent with these theories in that change in self-efficacy had a strong
effect. Thus, it was only the analyses based on other-ratings of transformational
leadership behavior that were not consistent with these theories. Possibly, others take
longer to recognize change in leaders’ behavior than leaders themselves do, because
they have fewer opportunities to observe the leaders’ behavior. By obtaining our
ratings of leadership behavior at a later point in time, we may have seen stronger
effects in the analyses using supervisor, team and peer ratings of leaders’ behavior.

Limitations
This study has several strengths, being designed around a strong intervention (a one-
year training program utilizing a combination of developmental techniques) and
carried out in an organizational setting, with pre- and post-training measures obtained
from four different sources. However, the study participants came from one organization
and experienced the same training program. The generalizability of our findings
therefore depends on the extent to which this organization and this training program
are representative of leadership development interventions in other organizations.
The training intervention investigated in this study employed what are currently popular
elements of leadership development interventions, such as 360-degree feedback, training
workshops and executive coaching, but the way in which these elements are presented
and delivered, and the environment in which they are delivered, may affect their
behavioral and psychological impact. There is therefore a need to establish whether our

187

Transformational
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development

findings can be replicated with a larger sample, ideally involving participants from a
range of organizations and training programs.

In addition, most of the items from our transformational leadership measure were
derived from existing, validated measures. However, to ensure that the measure
assessed leadership behaviors that were relevant for the organizational context,
we used a combination of items from multiple sources. While this approach ensured
that our measure of leadership behavior was practically relevant, the measure was
not directly comparable with other measures of transformational leadership behavior
in the literature. For this reason also, it would be desirable to test the replicability of
our findings.

Finally, although there was consistency in the finding that change in positive affect
was related to change in transformational leadership behavior, our other findings
varied depending on whether self- or other-ratings were used to assess change in
transformational leadership behavior. Two factors may have been responsible for this
variation. First, the relationship between the psychological measures and self-ratings
of leadership behavior may have been inflated by common method variance effects.
However, having controlled for both pre-training measures of psychological attributes
and pre-training measures of behavior, the impact of common method variance on our
findings would have been reduced. Second, supervisors, peers and team members
may take longer to recognize changes in leaders’ behavior. By capturing additional
follow-up measures of leadership behavior in future research we should be able to
clarify the relationship between change in self-efficacy, change in perspective taking,
and change in transformational leadership behavior.

Practical implications
This study extends our understanding of the process of leadership development in
several ways. First, the study provides new insight into the variability in leaders’
reactions to training. Using a novel statistical technique, we found that
transformational leadership training is associated with negative effects as well as
positive effects. While this finding is consistent with prior research (Atwater et al.,
1995; Hazucha et al., 1993; Kluger and DeNisi, 1996; London and Smither, 1995;
Spreitzer and Quinn, 1996), our study extends these findings by revealing that these
effects encompass leaders’ psychological attributes as well as their leadership
behavior. While effects of training on leaders’ leadership self-efficacy have been
reported in the past (Baron and Morin, 2010; Finn et al., 2007; Towler, 2003), we
found that leadership training also had an effect on the way in which leaders made
attributions about their team members’ behavior, and the frequency with which they
felt happy and energized a work. These findings highlight the importance of delivering
effective leadership interventions, not only so as to ensure that the behavioral goals
of the intervention are achieved, but also to avoid negative psychological outcomes for
leaders, which may in turn have flow-on effects.

In practice, these findings suggest that leaders’ psychological reactions should be
supported and monitored during developmental interventions. Both training designers
and trainers need to be aware of the possibility that transformational leadership
training can have negative psychological impacts for leaders. While we have a
responsibility for ensuring that leaders do not experience significant negative effects
as a result of participating in leadership training, the finding that these psychological
reactions are connected to behavioral outcomes suggests that leaders’
psychological reactions may also represent a means through which the effectiveness

188

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35,3

of leadership interventions can be improved. For example, by promoting positive affect
in the training environment, it may be possible to achieve more positive change in
transformational leadership behavior.

Theoretical implications and directions for further research
Our study supports the proposition, derived from social cognitive theory (Bandura,
1986, 1997, 2001), that there is a relationship between change in transformational
leadership behavior and change in leaders’ psychological attributes. This finding
represents an important contribution to transformational leadership research. Although
there is growing interest in identifying leader attributes that are associated with
transformational leadership behavior (Avolio, 1994; Bono and Judge, 2004; Kuhnert
and Lewis, 1987; Mandell and Pherwani, 2003; Richardson and Vandenberg, 2005),
our study is one of few which actually explores these relationships longitudinally, in a
learning context (Day, 2000). Importantly, we found that the relationship between
transformational leadership behaviors and leaders’ psychological attributes differed
depending on whether we examined the static relationship or the dynamic relationship.
Furthermore, the strongest relationships were observed in the analyses which explored
change in the measures over time, rather than in the analyses focussing on static
correlations among measures. Thus, our findings suggest that more of the variance in
leaders’ reactions to training can be explained by focussing on dynamic relationships
among constructs, rather than the more static and trait-like constructs that are often
the focus of leadership research (e.g. Judge et al., 2002; Sosik et al., 2009; van Emmerik
et al., 2010).

This line of research offers many exciting directions for further research.
For example, while social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2001) predicts that
the relationship between change in leader attributes and change in behavior will be
reciprocal, further empirical research is needed to establish the direction of this
relationship. If we can establish that change in positive affect is a precursor of change
in transformational leadership, we may be moving toward identifying a pathway
through which the effects of leadership interventions can be strengthened. In addition,
if change in transformational leadership behavior can be shown to have an impact
on leaders’ positive affect, then we expand our understanding of the benefits of
transformational leadership development.

Second, the social cognitive framework (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2001) conceptualizes
learning as a function of behavior, personal factors, and the environment. In this study,
the only environmental factor that was explored was the training program. However,
informal feedback from the executive coaches who were working with the leaders
suggested that leaders’ workloads were important. Some leaders felt that their high
workloads prevented them from carrying out their developmental plans and fully
embracing the training opportunity. This feedback raises an alternative explanation
for our study findings. Leaders who experienced high work overload may have been
both less likely to experiment with new behavior, and less likely to experience an increase
in positive affect. According to this proposition, the observed association between change
in leader behavior and change in the leader’s positive affect might reflect the effect of work
overload on both variables. Thus, future research in this area should examine whether the
relationship between change in positive affect and change in transformational leadership
behavior remains after controlling for the effect of work overload.

Finally, we found that change in positive affect is associated with improvements
in transformational leadership behavior. Our findings therefore extend the

189

Transformational
leadership
development

broaden-and-build theory of affect (Fredrickson, 1998, 2004) by illustrating the
importance of positive affect in the realm of leadership development.

Conclusion
This study, informed by social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2001), reveals
that leaders’ reactions to transformational leadership training include psychological
as well as behavioral changes. Furthermore, the psychological changes that leaders
experience over the period of the training are associated with the amount of
improvement or decline that leaders experience in their transformational leadership
behavior. These findings extend both our understanding of the effects of leadership
development interventions, and the processes underlying change in leader behavior.
By continuing to investigate the nature of the relationship between psychological
changes and change in transformational leadership behavior we should be able to
design leadership development interventions that are more effective in supporting
leaders’ development.

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About the authors

Dr Claire Mason is an Applied Social Scientist within the Science into Society Group of the
CSIRO. She completed her PhD in psychology at the University of Queensland. Her research
projects include understanding leadership development, to understanding group-level job satisfaction,
to understanding the social value of welfare service delivery to expectations of mining in Australia.
Dr Claire Mason is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: claire.mason@csiro.au

Mark Griffin is a Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Western
Australia. He holds a PhD in industrial/organizational psychology from The Pennsylvania State
University. His research addresses the link between organizational contexts and individual
behavior in areas such as leadership, safety, and work performance.

Sharon Parker is a Winthrop Professor in the Business School at the University of Western
Australia, as well as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her research interests
include job design, leadership, organisational change, proactivity, and self-efficacy.

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com
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Skill Builder 12:

Annotated Bibliography Guidelines

How to Construct an Annotated Bibliography Entry

The annotated bibliography is meant to be a short-cut for you. You will read hundreds of journal articles, so it

will be necessary for you to have a way to refresh your memory without having to read the entire article again.

Annotated bibliographies should be around 200-250 words maximum. Most of the questions below may be

answered in one or two sentences. Remember, your writing must be succinct and concise.

1. Identify the purpose of the study. Mention the research question (note, do not list the hypotheses in a

quantitative study – just list the overall research question).

2. Population – to what population of people did the study refer (note, this is different than the sample).

3. Sample – who participated in the study? How many participated? How were they recruited (purposeful

sample, random sample, etc.).

http://endnote.com/kb/82169

http://library.ncu.edu/faq/faqview/1407

http://www.criticalthinking.org/articles/sts-developing-rational-persons.cfm

https://vac.ncu.edu/critical-reading-and-logical-thinking/

http://www.viddler.com/v/b1508c21

4. What type of Methodology was used – quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods?

5. What Design within the Methodology was used?

If quantitative, was it a correlational study, experimental, causal (cause and effect)?

If qualitative, was it a phenomenological study, case study, ethnographical study, other?

If mixed methods, describe the designs used.

6. Instruments

If quantitative, which survey instrument(s) was (were) used?

If qualitative, were the interviews recorded, face-to-face, over the phone? Did the researcher review

documentation, visit the field, etc.?

If mixed, describe the instruments used.

7. Data Analysis

If quantitative, was SPSS used? Excel? Other?

If qualitative, was Nvivo used? Excel? Other?

If mixed, describe (briefly) how the data was analyzed.

8. Briefly share the results, conclusions, or findings of the study.

9. Mention the limitations of the study.

10. Describe the recommendations for further study.

Annotated Bibliography Guidelines

Refer to the following guidelines for formatting your Annotated Bibliographies. Throughout your program, you

will read hundreds of journal articles and scholarly resources that you will use for your literature review. You

must have a way to remind yourself of each of the articles so that you will not have to read them each time you

want to incorporate them into your proposal and dissertation.

Introduction. Tell the reader the purpose of the paper and an overview of what will be discovered. For

example, the purpose of the paper is to present two annotated bibliographies.

Alphabetized by author. Just as you would in a reference list, be sure to present your annotated bibliographies

(citations) in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.

Use the hanging indent format. Within each annotated bibliography, all of the text, including the write-up

beneath the citation, should be indented so that the first author’s last name is the only text that is flush left. The

write-up, including the citation, should be double spaced with the hanging indent format through each write-up.

On the references page, each reference should be single spaced with a double space between and presented in

the hanging indent format.

No headings. Because you will discuss one resource at a time, there is no need for headings between each

write-up within the annotated bibliographies.

Brief. Annotations are usually one to three paragraphs. Remember, this is an annotated bibliography, not a

research paper. Try to keep your annotations concise and clear with no more 200-250 words. Stay within the

specific elements of an annotated bibliography.

No citations. You do not need to use in-text citations within an annotation because the source of your

information is clear (and listed above in your annotated citation). Also, because each annotation is specific to

only one source, you should not refer to any other sources within the annotation.

No direct quotations. Because annotations give your summary, analysis, and application, there is no need to

use direct quotations. An annotation is your own interpretation of the information.

No referrals to the first or second person. Remember to be objective and remove yourself from annotations.

Annotated bibliographies do not allow for the use of I, me, my, he, she, we, our, you, us, they, or them.

Provide a short conclusion or summary for the entire document after the last annotated bibliography. The

conclusion or summary of the entire document should not be indented – go back to the left margin and

remember to indent only the first sentence of a new paragraph. Remember, the conclusion summarizes what

was presented in the entire paper, and is linked to the introduction.

References Page. When citing sources in a document, you must provide a References Page, even with

Annotated Bibliographies. NCU requires all references to be in the hanging indent format and single spaced

with a double space between. Use the References Page Toolkit to ensure your references page is formatted in

accordance with the particular resource. Recall, if you cite a source in your paper, it must appear on the

references page.

SERVANT LEADERSHIP AND SERVING CULTURE: INFLUENCE
ON INDIVIDUAL AND UNIT PERFORMANCE

ROBERT C. LIDEN
SANDY J. WAYNE

University of Illinois at Chicago

CHENWEI LIAO
Michigan State University

JEREMY D. MEUSER
University of Illinois at Chicago

In a sample of 961 employees working in 71 restaurants of a moderately sized
restaurant chain, we investigated a key tenet of servant leadership theory—that ser-
vant leaders guide followers to emulate the leader’s behavior by prioritizing the needs
of others above their own. We developed and tested a model contending that servant
leaders propagate servant leadership behaviors among followers by creating a serving
culture, which directly influences unit (i.e., restaurant/store) performance and en-
hances individual attitudes and behaviors directly and through the mediating influ-
ence of individuals’ identification with the unit. As hypothesized, serving culture was
positively related both to restaurant performance and employee job performance,
creativity, and customer service behaviors, and negatively related to turnover inten-
tions, both directly and through employee identification with the restaurant. Same-
source common method bias was reduced by employing five sources of data: employ-
ees, restaurant managers, customers, internal audits by headquarters staff, and
external audits by a consulting firm.

Servant leadership is based on the premise that
leaders who are best able to motivate followers are
those who focus least on satisfying their own per-
sonal needs and most on prioritizing the fulfillment
of followers’ needs (Greenleaf, 1970). Leaders who

are more concerned about others than themselves
are humble, and their humility stimulates strong
relationships with followers and encourages fol-
lowers to become fully engaged in their work (Ow-
ens & Hekman, 2012). Given its focus on leader
behaviors that help followers to realize their full
potential, servant leadership represents a positive
approach to organizational behavior (Cameron &
Spreitzer, 2012), the study of which refers to the
“application of positively oriented human resource
strengths and psychological capacities that can be
measured, developed, and effectively managed for
performance improvement in today’s workplace”
(Luthans, 2002: 59). Servant leadership consists of
seven dimensions (Liden, Wayne, Zhao, & Hender-
son, 2008), including emotional healing or being
sensitive to the personal setbacks of followers, cre-
ating value for the community, such as encouraging
followers to engage in volunteer activities that ben-
efit local communities, conceptual skills, or the
problem-solving abilities and task knowledge that
are prerequisites for providing help to followers,
empowering, helping subordinates grow and suc-

This study was funded by a grant from the SHRM
Foundation. However, the interpretations, conclusions
and recommendations are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent the views of the SHRM Foundation.
We are grateful for the cooperation of the employees,
managers, and Director of HR of the participating organ-
ization and the support of its CEO. In addition, we thank
members of the Society for Organizational Behavior, par-
ticularly Maureen Ambrose, Jeff Edwards, Dan Ganster,
Marshall Schminke, Jeffrey Vancouver, and Larry Wil-
liams, who provided valuable comments that helped us
to frame the model and analyze the data. We are also
thankful to Xiaoyun Cao, Turah Flowers, Anahi Kelly,
Gretchen Kemner, Hae Sang Park, and Shu Wang for their
assistance with data entry. Chenwei Liao worked on this
research while he was a doctoral student at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Chicago.

1434

� Academy of Management Journal
2014, Vol. 57, No. 5, 1434–1452.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.0034

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ceed, putting subordinates first, and behaving eth-
ically. Although other approaches to leadership in-
clude supporting followers, the strong emphasis on
leading by serving followers, captured in the name,
servant leadership, is unique among leadership ap-
proaches. It is thought that when leaders place a
priority on providing tangible and emotional sup-
port to followers and assisting followers in reach-
ing their full potential, followers in turn see the
leader as a role model and engage in appropriate
behaviors, not through coercion, but because they
want to do so (Greenleaf, 1970).

Research has demonstrated that servant leader-
ship is related to follower outcomes, including job
attitudes, organizational citizenship behavior
(OCB), and performance (Liden, Panaccio, Meuser,
Hu, & Wayne, 2014; van Dierendonck, 2011) as well
as outcomes at the team (Ehrhart, 2004; Hu & Liden,
2011; Schaubroeck, Lam, & Peng, 2011) and organ-
izational (Peterson, Galvin, & Lange, 2012) levels,
even when controlling for two dominant leadership
approaches (Dinh, Lord, Gardner, Meuser, Liden, &
Hu, 2014), namely transformational leader behav-
iors and leader–member exchange (LMX) (Liden et
al., 2008; Peterson et al., 2012; Schaubroeck et al.,
2011). This explanation of important outcomes be-
yond the two prevailing leadership approaches
begs an explanation for how servant leadership in-
fluences employee behaviors. Our main purpose is
to continue the momentum on servant leadership
research by enhancing our understanding of how it
promotes positive outcomes.

Initial research on the processes through which
servant leadership relates to outcomes has revealed
that procedural justice climate (Ehrhart, 2004),
team potency (Hu & Liden, 2011), and trust (Schau-
broeck et al., 2011) mediate relationships between
team/unit-level servant leadership and team/unit per-
formance and/or team/unit OCB. In a cross-level
study, Walumbwa, Hartnell, and Oke (2010) showed
that team-level procedural justice and service cli-
mates and individual-level self-efficacy and com-
mitment to the supervisor mediated the relation-
ship between team-level servant leadership and
individual-level OCBs. Hunter et al. (2013) also
found support for the role of service climate as
mediating the relationship between team-level ser-
vant leadership and subjectively rated team perfor-
mance. These studies have provided evidence con-
cerning how servant leadership influences outcomes
at the team level. The purpose of the current inves-
tigation was to extend theory development on the
processes underlying relationships between ser-

vant leadership and outcomes at the work unit
levels, as well to contribute to the sparse research
on the cross-level effects that unit-level variables
have on individual responses. Although Greenleaf
(1970) provided a general philosophy for how serv-
ing others influences outcomes, and Graham (1991)
delineated differences between servant leadership
and transformational leadership, theory enhance-
ments capable of supporting refined testable hy-
potheses are needed.

Consistent with Greenleaf’s (1970) contention
that servant leaders instill in followers a desire to
serve others, we introduce serving culture as a key
mechanism through which servant leadership be-
havior affects individual and unit outcomes. Cul-
ture is defined as “a pattern of shared basic as-
sumptions learned by a group as it solved its
problems of external adaptation and internal inte-
gration, which has worked well enough to be con-
sidered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new
members as the correct way to perceive, think, and
feel in relation to those problems” (Schein, 2010:
18). More specifically, serving culture resides in
the current investigation at the unit level and refers
to the “behavioral norms and shared expectations”
of placing a priority on helping others (Cooke &
Rousseau, 1988: 255). Engagement in these behav-
iors, which are thought to be relevant to all mem-
bers of the unit, can be substantially influenced by
upper-level leadership (Gelfand, Leslie, Keller, &
de Dreu, 2012; Schein, 1990). Underlying behav-
ioral expectations are values upon which these ex-
pectations are based (Rousseau, 1990). Cultural val-
ues serve to solidify the behavioral norms and
expectations. We contend that leaders may influ-
ence the culture by directly encouraging follower
engagement in serving behaviors and indirectly by
modeling desired behaviors, which then are ad-
opted by followers, as explained by social learning
theory (Bandura, 1977). We propose that because
servant leaders tend to be respected and admired
by followers, they become motivated to emulate
their leaders’ behaviors. Follower modeling of the
helping and supportive behaviors displayed by ser-
vant leaders are further strengthened as followers
solidify their identification with the group. As they
begin to view and project themselves to others as a
proud member of the group, their positive work
behaviors become part of how they see themselves
as individuals (Ashforth, 2001). We thus rely on
social learning and social identity theories in ex-
plaining the emergence of a serving culture and the

2014 1435Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

positive effects this culture has on key individual
and unit outcomes.

In the current investigation, we contribute to the
leadership literature in three ways. First, we assess
the critical premise of servant leadership theory
that servant leaders strive to develop a serving
culture that is based on behavioral norms and ex-
pectations that place a priority on helping others.
Second, we explore the influence of servant lead-
ership behavior via the mediating effect of serving
culture on both individual job behaviors and unit-
level performance. Third, we develop and test
cross-level hypotheses based on social identity the-
ory (Tajfel, 1972; Tajfel & Turner, 1986), proposing
that a serving culture that is based on prioritizing
the needs of others above one’s own needs en-
hances followers’ identification with the unit.
Through this process we expect servant leadership
to indirectly impact individual behaviors and
attitudes, including performance, creativity, orien-
tation toward serving others, and turnover inten-
tions. We test our hypotheses with a large sample of
employees and managers working in 71 restau-
rants/stores of a moderately sized restaurant chain.

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES

One of the central tenets of the servant leadership
philosophy extolled by Greenleaf (1970) is that
serving others includes grooming some followers
so that they too can become servant leaders. Fol-
lower emulation of leader behavior has been iden-
tified as a key attribute of servant leadership (Gra-
ham, 1991). Whereas other leadership approaches,
such as ethical and transformational leadership,
include the notion of follower imitation of leader
behavior, the cultivation of servant leadership
among followers is central to servant leadership
(Greenleaf, 1970). Servant leaders may consciously
or unconsciously encourage follower behaviors
through role modeling (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), a
process explained by social learning theory (Ban-
dura, 1977). Social learning theory represents a de-
parture from reinforcement theories of learning by
arguing that people can learn simply by observing
and replicating the behavior of others. Consistent
support for modeling behavior as outlined in social
learning theory has been found in laboratory exper-
iments (Sy, Côté, & Saavedra, 2005) as well as field
examinations (Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes,
& Salvador, 2009) of the “contagion” or “trickle-
down” effects of leadership through follower mod-
eling of leader behavior.

Leaders are often viewed as role models given
their formal status, position power, and referent
power (Yukl, 2010), which results in followers im-
itating the behaviors of their immediate superiors
(Weiss, 1977; Yaffe & Kark, 2011). Follower mod-
eling of leader behavior may also be prevalent be-
cause leaders often serve as mentors to their follow-
ers (Sosik & Godshalk, 2000) and protégés often
learn by imitating the behaviors of their mentors
(Lankau & Scandura, 2002). Followers are espe-
cially inclined to model leader behaviors when
they perceive the leader as possessing desirable
qualities (Hannah, Walumbwa, & Fry, 2011; Lankau
& Scandura, 2002; Mayer, Aquino, Greenbaum, &
Kuenzi, 2012; Neubert, Kacmar, Carlson, Chonko, &
Roberts, 2008), and servant leaders possess many
attractive characteristics. Servant leaders’ integrity
and concern for others enhance their attractiveness,
as does the trust that servant leaders inspire in
others (Schaubroeck et al., 2011). In addition, their
expertise, as reflected in the conceptual skills di-
mension of servant leadership identified by Liden
et al. (2008), likely translates into followers per-
ceiving that the leader is credible (Brown &
Treviño, 2006; Walumbwa et al., 2010). When fol-
lowers perceive the leader as possessing desirable
qualities, they aspire to be like the leader and thus
model their leaders’ behavior (Mayer et al., 2012).
Indeed, it has been empirically demonstrated that
although there is variance in individuals’ reactions
to servant leadership behaviors, most individuals
express a preference for leaders who engage in
these behaviors (Meuser, Liden, Wayne, & Hender-
son, 2011). We therefore contend that engagement
in servant leadership behaviors propagates from
leaders to followers.

Empathy and behaving ethically are aspects of
servant leadership behavior that increase the attrac-
tiveness of servant leaders in the eyes of their fol-
lowers. Schaubroeck et al. (2011) found empirical
support for Greenleaf’s (1970) key proposition that
servant leaders’ empathy, ethical behavior, and pri-
oritization of follower needs develop mutual trust
between leaders and followers over time. Indeed,
good leaders are trusted more by their followers
than poor leaders (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002). This trust
in leaders primes followers’ receptivity to leader
initiatives designed to encourage them to engage in
serving behaviors (Colquitt, Scott, & LePine, 2007).
Reciprocation represents one way that followers
may model the servant leader behaviors of the
leader, because “Imitation is the sincerest [form] of
flattery” (Colton, 1824: 114). By openly prioritizing

1436 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

the personal and professional growth of followers,
servant leaders provide guidance and direction in
assisting follower modeling of servant leader be-
haviors. Modeling that involves both a demonstra-
tion of the behaviors as well as the guidance of
followers through activities that illustrate the be-
havior has been shown to be especially effective in
evoking behavior and attitude change in followers
(Bandura, Blanchard, & Ritter, 1969).

When multiple followers engage in serving be-
haviors, either as the result of direct grooming by
the leader or indirectly through the modeling of
leader behavior, a unique serving culture ensues.
Serving culture offers a way to theoretically inte-
grate servant leadership with the social context
(Glisson & James, 2002; Schneider, Ehrhart, &
Macey, 2011). We define “serving culture” as the
extent to which all members of the work unit en-
gage in servant leadership behaviors and operation-
alize it as aggregated individual employee reports
of perceived collective unit behavior. Serving cul-
ture is characterized as a work environment in
which participants share the understanding that
the behavioral norms and expectations are to pri-
oritize the needs of others above their own and to
provide help and support to others. We stress that
serving culture includes the behaviors of all mem-
bers of the collective of interest (e.g., group, unit),
not only the formal leaders. Defining serving cul-
ture in this way achieves consistency with servant
leadership theory, which stresses that servant lead-
ers cultivate serving behaviors among those around
them, including their followers (Graham, 1991;
Greenleaf, 1970; Liden et al., 2014).

We argue that for a serving culture to germinate,
grow, and eventually propagate within the collec-
tive, it is critical for the highest-level formal leader
of that entity to engage in servant leadership behav-
iors. This is because top leaders set the tone for the
behaviors expected of employees (Peterson et al.,
2012). This appears to occur through processes de-
scribed by social learning theory in which the lead-
er’s behaviors “trickle down” to subordinates
(Mayer et al., 2009, 2012; Sy et al., 2005). Servant
leadership, an approach to leading that is consis-
tent with positive organizational scholarship (Bono
& Ilies, 2006), represents a positive force that
spreads to followers through “contagion” pro-
cesses. Indeed, servant leaders as positive role
models stimulate employees’ personal change in
efforts to emulate the desired qualities and behav-
iors of that role model (Lord & Brown, 2004).
Through the direct developmental activities of the

servant leader and through follower modeling of
servant leader behaviors, a serving culture emerges.
But this culture does not surface unless those in
formal positions of authority embrace servant lead-
ership (Schein, 1990). We therefore contend that
the extent to which a serving culture exists is de-
termined by the degree to which the formal leader
of the entity engages in servant leader behaviors. In
the current investigation, the restaurant/store man-
ager is the highest-level formal leader within each
unit and thus fulfills this role of cultivating a serv-
ing culture.

Hypothesis 1. Store Manager servant leader-
ship is positively related to serving culture.

We propose that serving culture drives the effec-
tiveness of the entity as a whole. When the majority
of members of an entity are aligned in terms of what
behaviors are appropriate in the collective environ-
ment, the behavioral norms that make up the serv-
ing culture provide a roadmap that individuals use
in order to evaluate how best to respond to different
situations that they encounter at work. When mul-
tiple people in the work unit are engaged in serving
behaviors, the culture is perceived by participants
as one defined by putting the needs of others first,
behaving with integrity, and developing concep-
tual skills associated with thoroughly understand-
ing the tasks and overall business (Liden et al.,
2008). When serving others is seen as a defining
characteristic of the work unit, we contend that
members of the collective engage in behaviors that
benefit the unit and are willing to help each other,
such as freely sharing one’s task knowledge. Thus,
although the focus of servant leadership is on meet-
ing the needs of individual followers, we propose,
based on servant leadership philosophy espoused
by Greenleaf (1970), that servant leadership also
provides substantial benefits to the collective
through the culture cultivated by servant leaders.
Specifically, serving cultures are characterized by a
focus on understanding the needs of others and
helping others, both within and outside of the unit.
Help and support can range from disseminating
technical advice to providing emotional support to
assisting those in need of personal healing. Help
and support from others tends to motivate partici-
pants in the system to engage in behaviors that
benefit the whole (Cameron & Spreitzer, 2012).

Whereas some cultures are destructive and
linked to ineffective performance (Gelfand et al.,
2012), we contend that serving cultures are positive
and encourage participant behaviors that enhance

2014 1437Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

work unit performance (Cameron & Spreitzer,
2012). Peterson et al. (2012) proposed that this oc-
curs because followers who are empowered, en-
couraged to reach their highest potential, and pro-
vided with clarity of focus, strive to perform at the
highest level. Expanding on this, we argue that the
norms for behavior that provide the basis for a
serving culture result when servant leaders encour-
age mutual support among coworkers that benefits
unit performance. A culture based on serving oth-
ers not only creates norms for behaviors among its
members that promotes effectiveness internally,
but extends to interactions between members and
customers (Schneider, White, & Paul, 1998). In the
restaurant setting studied in the current investiga-
tion, this includes satisfying customers in multiple
ways, including the provision of clean stores, fresh
food, accurate orders, quick delivery, and delivery
accuracy. Consequently, a serving culture encour-
ages members of the work unit to put customers’
needs ahead of their own, culminating in superior
customer service (Schneider et al., 1998).

Hypothesis 2. Serving culture is positively re-
lated to store performance (composite of carry-
out accuracy, delivery accuracy, customer satis-
faction, facility audit, and sanitation audit).

Integrating the first two hypotheses suggests the
possibility that serving culture acts as a mediator of
the relationship between the store manager’s ser-
vant leadership behavior and store performance.
Cultures act to clarify behavioral expectations for
members of the collective (Schulte, Ostroff, Shmu-
lyian, & Kinicki, 2009). A serving culture that pro-
motes humility, caring for others, putting the needs
of others above one’s own needs, and concern for
the best interests of all stakeholders sends clear
signals that self-centered and unethical behaviors
are not tolerated. A serving culture provides mem-
bers of the collective with the understanding that
the focus is on behaviors that provide benefits for
others. The degree to which store managers engage
in servant leadership acts to build the culture and
helps members of the unit learn the behavioral
expectations linked to the culture (Schein, 1990).
Specifically, when the leader exhibits servant lead-
ership behaviors, followers also engage in serving
behaviors (Schein, 1990; van Knippenberg, van
Knippenberg, De Cremer, & Hogg, 2004). We con-
tend that the more the work unit’s culture is char-
acterized by a focus on serving others, the more
employees engage in behaviors that are beneficial

to the entity, culminating in higher collective
performance.

Hypothesis 3. Serving culture mediates the rela-
tionship between store manager servant leader-
ship and store performance (composite of carry-
out accuracy, delivery accuracy, customer
satisfaction, facility audit, and sanitation audit).

In addition to its effects on store performance, we
contend that serving culture, through its focus on
cooperation, sharing, mutual trust and support, and
caring for each other, fosters in employees an iden-
tification with the store in which they work. Born
from the implications of social identity theory (Ta-
jfel, 1972, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1986), group iden-
tification (Ashforth & Mael, 1989) occurs when em-
ployees adopt a view of themselves as members of
a group. An individual’s personal identity becomes
inseparable from the store to the extent that the
employee identifies with the unit and that collec-
tive identity is activated (Pratt, 1998). Specifically,
part of how a person defines one’s self is based on
working in the store (Tajfel, 1978). In essence, “as
the individual’s identity and fate become inter-
twined with those of the group, he or she becomes
a microcosm of the group” (Ashforth, Harrison, &
Corley, 2008: 333). Although group identification
can involve negative reactions (Dutton & Dukerich,
1991), it generally conveys positive emotion that
entails employees interpreting their membership in
the group as a dominant characteristic that defines
them as a person.

Interestingly, theory on both culture and identi-
fication has stressed the sense-making capabilities
of each (Ashforth et al., 2008; Harris, 1994). Group
identification helps employees make sense of their
surroundings, reducing ambiguity and uncertainty
(Hogg, 2000), and serves as a guide for behavior in
order to maintain consistency between internal
views of self and external action, thereby avoiding
cognitive discord and increasing self-continuity
(Vignoles, Regalia, Manzi, Golledge, & Scabini,
2006). It follows that individuals may find it easier
to make sense of their group experiences when they
identify with the group. And it is easier to identify
with a group whose culture is unambiguous and
consistent with the values of its participants (Ash-
forth, 2001). Indeed, employees identify with a
group to increase self-esteem (Tajfel & Turner,
1986; Turner, 1982).

As Ashforth et al. (2008) observed, group identi-
fication may represent a top-down process whereby
qualities of the group foster employee identifica-

1438 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

tion with the group. Qualities of the group are
evident from its culture, and it is through the cul-
ture that its members form a cognitive frame (or
schema) that encapsulates the values and behav-
ioral expectations of the group. It is from this
schema representing the group’s culture that indi-
viduals make sense of their work environments
(Harris, 1994). When working within a strong serv-
ing culture, the pervasiveness of positive elements,
such as trust in and helping and caring for others,
clarifies the expected behaviors and values of the
group and eases the process through which individ-
uals identify with the group. As group members en-
gage in behaviors that are consistent with the group’s
culture, these behaviors are reinforced by other group
members, which in turn serve to strengthen individ-
uals’ identification with the group.

Because people generally value the features of a
serving culture, such as being able to trust others, as
well as feeling cared for, respected, and supported
(McAllister, 1995), we argue that the positive rela-
tionship between serving culture and group identi-
fication is pervasive (Walumbwa, Mayer, Wang,
Wang, Workman, & Christensen, 2011). Identifica-
tion with a positive, helpful serving culture acts as
a guiding principle for viewing oneself in a positive
manner (Ashforth et al., 2008). Serving cultures
also focus on internal cooperation and interdepen-
dence, which further enhances the degree of iden-
tification with the organization (Mael & Ashforth,
1992). The stronger the serving culture, the clearer
the defining characteristics of the collective, and
the easier it is for members to make sense of the
setting in which they work.

Hypothesis 4. Serving culture is positively re-
lated to employee identification with the store.

We contend that servant leaders enhance follow-
ers’ identification with the work unit through the
creation of a serving culture. For example, leaders
are often seen as representatives of the organization
(Levinson, 1965), even to the point of embodying
the characteristics of the organization (Eisenberger
et al., 2010). As a relational leadership style, the
servant leader’s one-on-one attention to, and care
for, followers magnifies the salience of followers
serving fellow coworkers and customers. The per-
sonal relationships the servant leader forms with
followers help them to make sense of the work unit
and to develop an identity intertwined with the
work unit as represented by the leader. The helpful,
benevolent behaviors of the servant leader spread,
via social learning (Sy et al., 2005), to create the

culture. These values of serving others become a
defining characteristic of membership in the work
unit, strengthening the saliency of work unit iden-
tity as well as the positive perceptions of identify-
ing with that work unit. Therefore, it is through the
process of creating a serving culture that servant
leaders enhance the prominent characteristics of
the group— caring for others—and promote follow-
ers’ identification with the group.

Hypothesis 5. Serving culture mediates the
positive relationship between store manager
servant leadership behaviors and employee
identification with the store.

According to Pratt (1998), individuals incorpo-
rate the group’s values and beliefs into their own
identities as part of the emulation process. Thus,
when the store has established a serving culture
that emphasizes behaviors that assist others, em-
ployees who identify with the store are likely to
incorporate these values and use them to guide
their behaviors and attitudes that are linked to the
values espoused by the store. Thus, identification
with the store facilitates the transmission of a serv-
ing culture from the store level to employee behav-
iors and attitudes at the individual level.

When employees’ identification with their store
is high, the overlap in values and goals prompts
employees to form attitudes and engage in behav-
iors that are beneficial to the unit. Specifically,
when employees identify with the collective—in
this case the store— employees feel a sense of ca-
maraderie and unity with fellow employees (Ash-
forth & Mael, 1989); and because of the strong bond
that they have with their coworkers, they desire to
perform well. Conversely, when identification with
the unit is low, individuals feel a sense of detach-
ment from the team. Employees who do not iden-
tify with the team are less inclined to emulate the
behavior of colleagues with whom they have little
or no connection (Ashforth et al., 2008). The degree
to which employees emulate the normative behav-
iors of the unit translates into a positive association
between identification with the store and individ-
ual job performance.

In addition to performing at lower levels, em-
ployees whose identification with the unit is low
are likely to feel detached from the work unit,
which may prompt them to search for a more hos-
pitable and supportive environment (Mael & Ash-
forth, 1995). This is because most humans are so-
cial beings and seek to fulfill needs of belonging
and affiliation through relationships developed in

2014 1439Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

the workplace (Maslow, 1943). Meta-analytic re-
sults indicate a positive relationship between organ-
ization and team identification and job performance,
and a negative relationship between organization and
team identification and turnover intentions (Riketta
& van Dick, 2005). Employees are not likely to leave
a store whose culture has helped them develop a
personal understanding of themselves. Indeed, for
individuals who highly identify with a group, leav-
ing is akin to leaving part of oneself behind, along
with the psychological safety, consistency, and
self-esteem associated with that social identity.

We contend that identification with the store also
promotes employee creativity. The stronger em-
ployees’ identification with the store, the more they
care about the success of the store, which prompts
them to explore creative approaches to carrying out
their jobs (Cohen-Meitar, Carmeli, & Waldman,
2009). Indeed, creativity can be essential for fulfill-
ing the unique needs or specific requests of custom-
ers. Identification with the store with its concomi-
tant mutual support exchanged between employees
provides employees with psychological safety that
encourages creativity by reducing the risk associated
with initiating novel solutions for serving customers
(Ashforth et al., 2008; Pratt, 1998). Although Pratt
(2001) has cautioned that identification can be nega-
tively related to creativity because over-identification
with a group may engender conformity to rules, we
contend that serving cultures uniquely stress empow-
erment and freedom to express divergent points of
view (Greenleaf, 1970; Liden et al., 2008) in a psycho-
logically safe environment.

We posit that employee identification with the unit
also serves to build an orientation towards providing
service to customers. When employees see them-
selves as intertwined with their store, their behaviors
are driven by norms of the store, such as a focus on
serving customers (Schuh, Egold, & van Dick, 2012).
Indeed, when employees highly identify with the store,
they see themselves as representatives of the store and
feel responsible for maintaining a positive store im-
age in their interactions with customers.

Hypothesis 6. Employee identification with the
store is positively related to employee (a) in-
role performance, (b) creativity, and (c) cus-
tomer service behaviors, and negatively related
to (d) turnover intentions.

We reason that a serving culture directly and
indirectly (through store identification) affects in-
dividual outcomes. Regarding a direct effect, em-
ployees immersed within a serving culture learn

the culture (Schein, 1990) by modeling the behav-
iors of members of the collective, including both their
leaders and colleagues (Bandura, 1977). Positive cul-
tures are characterized by perceived fairness, oppor-
tunities for growth, and clear role expectations, and
people embedded in such cultures tend to develop
positive attitudes and engage in behaviors that are
conducive to effectiveness. It appears that positive
cultures instill in people hope and confidence in
their abilities, which enables them to perform well
(Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007), and to
bolster their resilience so that they can handle set-
backs and are less inclined to quit their jobs.

We argue that, in addition to a direct effect be-
tween serving culture and individual outcomes
(Hypothesis 4), store identification partially medi-
ates these relationships. Simply by being immersed
in a culture predicated on serving others (as sug-
gested by Hypothesis 6), some may find the culture
so compelling that they begin to see oneness be-
tween themselves and the store. In this sense, the
relationship between serving culture and individual
attitudes and behaviors operates in part through their
identification with the store. Indeed, beyond the im-
plications of social learning theory concerning em-
ployees’ tendency to observe and imitate behaviors
that are normative to the group’s culture, social iden-
tity theory also implies that when employees identify
with the group, they absorb its core values and ex-
hibit attitudes that are consistent with these values. In
sum, we contend that serving cultures promote favor-
able employee attitudes and behaviors, both directly
and indirectly, as implied by social learning theory
and social identification theory, respectively.

Hypothesis 7. Serving culture is positively re-
lated to employee (a) in-role performance, (b)
creativity, and (c) customer service behaviors,
and negatively related to (d) turnover intentions.

Hypothesis 8. Employee identification with the
store partially mediates the relationships be-
tween serving culture and employee (a) in-role
performance, (b) creativity, (c) customer ser-
vice behaviors, and (d) turnover intentions.

METHOD

Sample and Procedure

Store general managers and hourly employees of
76 restaurants (34% of the chain’s total restaurants)
located in 6 U.S. states were invited to participate.
To enhance data collection efficiency, we ran-

1440 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

domly selected restaurants within the 10 metropol-
itan areas containing the largest number of restau-
rants in the chain. Managers responded to a web-
based survey and employees completed paper
surveys on site during paid work hours with a
member of our research team present.

Seventy-one managers (response rate � 93%)
and 1,143 employees (response rate � 71%) com-
pleted surveys. We restricted our sample to em-
ployees who worked at least 20 hours a week and
had a store tenure of at least 1 month, resulting in a
final employee sample size of 961. The average
number of employees per store in the final sample
was 13.53 (SD � 4.44). The average age of the
managers was 35.37 (SD � 7.35) years; 5 (7%)
were women; in terms of ethnicity, 47 described
themselves as Caucasian (66%), 11 Hispanic (16%),
5 Asian (7%), 2 African-American (3%), and 1 Mid-
dle-Eastern (1%), with 5 (7%) missing responses;
with regard to education level, 33 (47%) had a high
school diploma, 12 (17%) had an associate degree,
21 (30%) had a college degree, and 1 (1%) had a
graduate degree, with 4 (5%) missing responses;
average tenure was 8.62 (SD � 4.04) years for the
organization and 3.51 (SD � 3.12) years at the store.
The average age of employees was 30.25 (SD � 10.61)
years; 494 (51%) were women; in terms of ethnicity,
519 considered themselves Hispanic (54%), 245 Cau-
casian (26%), 75 African-American (8%), 24 Asian-
American (3%), 6 Native American (1%), and 7 Mid-
dle-Eastern (1%), with 85 missing responses (7%);
594 employees (62%) had a high school degree, 119
(12%) had an associate degree, 55 (6%) had a college
degree, 16 (2%) had a graduate degree, 171 (18%) had
no degrees, and 6 did not report. Employees had an
average of 3.63 (SD � 3.80) years of organizational
tenure and had worked 2.99 (SD � 3.19) years in their
current store.

Measures

The variables included are part of a larger study.
All response scales for the measures were on a 1 �
strongly disagree to 7 � strongly agree scale with
the exception of the response scale for the store
performance dimensions.

Servant leadership. Employees evaluated their
managers’ servant leadership using a shortened
version of the servant leadership scale developed
by Liden et al. (2008). The original scale has 28
items measuring 7 dimensions of servant leader-
ship; the 7-item scale is composed of the highest

loading item from each of the 7 dimensions: (1) My
manager can tell if something work-related is going
wrong; (2) My manager makes my career develop-
ment a priority; (3) I would seek help from my
manager if I had a personal problem; (4) My man-
ager emphasizes the importance of giving back to
the community; (5) My manager puts my best in-
terests ahead of his/her own; (6) My manager gives
me the freedom to handle difficult situations in the
way that I feel is best; (7) My manager would NOT
compromise ethical principles in order to achieve
success. Thus, all 7 dimensions were captured in
the short version (� � .84).

Given that we did not use the full 28-item servant
leadership scale, we assessed the validity of the
7-item short version by comparing the 7- and 28-
item versions of the scale using an independent
field sample in which followers rated their leaders
using the 28-item version of the Liden et al. (2008)
servant leadership scale. We obtained a sample
from a large real estate company. The dyadic sam-
ple consisted of 190 employees for which complete
data on the 28-item scale were available (38% ef-
fective response rate). There were 178 complete
dyads that included all 28 servant leadership items
as well as organizational citizenship behavior di-
rected toward the organization (OCB-O) items as
measured with Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman,
and Fetter’s (1990) 14-item scale (� � .88). The
correlation between the 28-item and 7-item com-
posites was .97 and the �’s for the 7- and 28-item
versions were .87 and .96, respectively. A confir-
matory factor analysis (CFA) provides support for
our 7-item scale as representing a single factor
(comparative fit index (CFI) � .99; normed fit
index (NFI) � .97; goodness of fit index
(GFI) � .96; standardized root-mean-square re-
sidual (SRMR) � .03; root-mean-square error of
approximation (RMSEA) � .07). In order to assess
comparative criterion-related validity, we also
tested the relationships between servant leader-
ship and manager-rated OCB-O, comparing the
7-item and the 28-item scales. The 7-item scale
was significantly related to OCB-O (R2 � .15, F(1,
177) � 30.45, p � .01; � � .38, p � .01) as was
true with the full 28-item scale (R2 � .17, F(1,
177) � 34.96, p � .01; � � .41, p � .01).

Serving culture. Serving culture of the store was
reported by employees. Following the referent-shift
consensus model (Chan, 1998), we modified the
7-item servant leadership scale described above to
create the serving culture measure (� � .82). We
replaced “managers” with “managers and employ-

2014 1441Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

ees” for all 7 items to assess perceptions of the
extent to which everyone within a store engaged in
the behavior depicted in the item: (1) Managers and
employees at our store can tell if something work-
related is going wrong; (2) Managers and employees
at our store make employee career development a
priority; (3) Managers and employees at our store
would seek help from others if they had a personal
problem; (4) Managers and employees at our store
emphasize the importance of giving back to the
community; (5) Managers and employees at our
store put others’ best interests ahead of their own;
(6) Managers and employees at our store give others
the freedom to handle difficult situations in the
way that they feel is best; (7) Managers and employ-
ees at our store would NOT compromise ethical
principles in order to achieve success.

Identification with the store. We used a 5-item
organizational identification scale (Mael & Ash-
forth, 1992) to assess employee identification with
the store. A sample item is, “When someone crit-
icizes our store, it feels like a personal insult”
(� � .86).

Store performance. The store performance mea-
sure was a composite formed by five measures from
three sources collected by the corporate headquarters.
Specifically, store performance was a composite of
carryout accuracy, delivery accuracy, customer sat-
isfaction, facility audit score, and sanitation audit
score. These measures were provided by our hu-
man resources contact at the corporate headquar-
ters and were regularly collected and used inter-
nally as overall store performance indicators by the
organization. Customers provided ratings on carry-
out accuracy, delivery accuracy, and customer sat-
isfaction. Facility audits, conducted by corporate
headquarters staff, reflected how well each store
maintained its exterior and interior facilities, such
as patio furniture, floor tiles, salad bar, drink sta-
tion, and ice cream machine, with higher scores
indicating higher-quality conditions. The sanita-
tion audit, which was conducted by an external
firm, assessed the levels of health, safety, and
cleanliness of food, with higher scores indicating
better sanitation. Because the indicators were not
on the same measurement scale, we standardized
them (z-scores) prior to model estimation. This
standardization procedure ensured that each of the
five indicators had an equal weight in determining
the store performance composite.

In-role performance. Employees’ in-role perfor-
mance was evaluated by their managers using 4
items from the scale developed by Williams and

Anderson (1991). A sample item is, “In general, this
employee adequately completes assigned duties”
(� � .92).

Creativity. Managers rated employees with Tier-
ney and Farmer’s (2011) 4-item scale. A sample
item is, “This employee tries out new ideas and
approaches to problems” (� � .92).

Customer service behaviors. Employees were
rated by managers using an adaptation of the 4-item
customer orientation scale from Rogg, Schmidt,
Shull, and Schmitt (2001). An example item is,
“This employee consistently anticipates customer
needs and takes appropriate actions to satisfy their
needs” (� � .88).

Turnover intentions. Turnover intentions were
based on employees’ self-reports on a 5-item scale
from Wayne, Shore, and Liden (1997). A sample item
is, “As soon as I can find a better job, I’ll leave
[company name]” (� � .81).

Confirmatory and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Results of CFAs, run to determine whether our
measurement model captured distinct constructs,
showed that the hypothesized 7-factor model pro-
vided an acceptable fit to the data, with �2 (573,
n � 961) � 2,060.66, CFI � .92, Tucker-Lewis in-
dex (TLI) � .92, RMSEA � .05, and SRMR � .04.
All of the observed items had significant loadings
on their respective latent factors. We further com-
pared our hypothesized measurement model to three
alternatives: (1) a 2-factor model with manager-rated
outcomes loading on 1 latent factor and employee-
rated variables loading on another, which provided
a significantly worse fit to our hypothesized model,
with ��2 (20, n � 961) � 6,335.42, p � .01; (2)
servant leadership and serving culture, specified to
load on 1 latent factor, employees’ attitudinal vari-
ables (i.e., employee identification with the store,
and turnover intentions) on a 2nd latent factor, and
employee behavioral outcomes on a 3rd factor,
which provided a worse fit than our hypothesized
model, with ��2 (18, n � 961) � 5,103.87, p � .01;
and (3) a 6-factor solution with servant leadership
and serving culture loading on one factor and the
other variables on their own respective factors,
which provided a worse fit than our hypothesized
model, with ��2 (6, n � 961) � 595.67, p � .01. In
addition, we conducted an exploratory factor anal-
ysis with principal axis factoring extraction and
oblique rotation, and we found that servant leader-
ship and serving culture were perceived distinctly
by employees, with items from the two measures

1442 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

having clean loadings on their respective construct.
These results indicated that the measures used in
the present study captured distinct constructs as
expected.

Data Aggregation and Levels of Analysis

To test the hypothesized multilevel model, ser-
vant leadership of the manager and serving culture
were aggregated to the store level, which was ap-
propriate based on results of a one-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA), which showed that the means
of servant leadership and serving culture differed
significantly across stores, with F(70, 888) � 2.71,
p � .01, and F(70, 887) � 1.99, p � .01, respec-
tively. In addition, intra-class correlations, ICC(1)
and ICC(2), were respectively .11 and .60 for ser-
vant leadership and .07 and .50 for serving culture.
Lastly, the median within-group inter-rater reliabil-
ity (rwg(j); James, Demaree, & Wolf, 1984) across
stores was .94 for servant leadership and .95 for
serving culture.

Analytic Strategy

Because employees’ responses were nested within
stores (units), we used Mplus 6 (Muthén & Muthén,
2010), which allowed us to estimate our multilevel
model simultaneously. Given the nature of our path
model, we used manifest variables in the estimation.
Also, maximum likelihood with robust standard er-
rors was used for coefficient estimates (for technical
details, see Muthén & Muthén, 2010). We tested the

significance of multilevel indirect effects using the
Monte Carlo method1 to compute confidence inter-
vals (CIs) (Preacher, Zyphur, & Zhang, 2010).

RESULTS

Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations,
and bivariate correlations of the variables.

Model Estimation

In order to estimate our model, we specified
paths from employee identification with the store
to outcomes at the individual level, allowing slopes
to randomly vary across stores. Cross-level direct
effects were specified from serving culture to em-
ployee identification with the store and individual
outcomes. At the store level, store manager servant
leadership was specified to have a direct effect on
serving culture, which would, in turn, relate posi-
tively to store performance. The Akaike informa-
tion criterion (AIC) value of the hypothesized
model was 12,425.23, smaller than that of the
model without direct paths from serving culture to
individual outcomes (AIC � 13,545.93); this indi-
cated that our hypothesized model was superior.2

Furthermore, pseudo R2 (~R2) was calculated using

1 Technical details and the R-based Monte Carlo sim-
ulator are available from http://www.quantpsy.org.

2 We estimated an alternative model with additional
direct paths specified. The alternative model added di-
rect paths from servant leadership to store performance,
individual outcomes, and employee identification with

TABLE 1
Means, Standard Deviations, and Bivariate Correlations

Variables M SD 1 2 3 4 5

Store-Level
1. Store Manager Servant Leadership 5.41 .54 .84
2. Serving Culture 4.99 .42 .69** .82
3. Store Performance .00 .56 .31* .27* —
Individual Level
1. Employee Identification with the Store 5.78 1.18 .86
2. In-Role Performance 5.82 .87 .10** .92
3. Creativity 4.48 1.09 .10** .43** .92
4. Customer Service Behaviors 5.32 1.14 .10** .58** .66** .88
5. Turnover Intentions 3.12 1.21 –.26** –.06 –.05 –.06 .81

Note: n � 952–961 for individual-level variables. n � 53–71 for store-level variables. Internal consistency coefficients, Cronbach’s
alphas, are reported in bold on the diagonal. Store Performance consists of carryout accuracy, delivery accuracy, customer satisfaction,
facility audit, and sanitation audit, all of which were z-standardized in forming the composite.

* p � .05

** p � .01

2014 1443Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

Snijders and Bosker’s (1999) formulas to indicate
the total amount of variation in the level-1 and
level-2 outcome variables that were accounted for
by our model. In total, the proportion of variance
explained by our model was 6% for store perfor-
mance, 8% for in-role performance, 6% for creativ-
ity, 9% for customer service behaviors, and 68% for
turnover intentions.

Tests of Hypotheses

Results of direct effects appear in Figure 1, while
Table 2 presents the estimated indirect effects. As

shown in Figure 1, store manager servant leader-
ship was positively related to serving culture (� �
.54, p � .01); therefore, Hypothesis 1 was sup-
ported. Furthermore, supporting Hypothesis 2,
serving culture related positively with store perfor-
mance (� � .33, p � .05). To test the mediation
hypothesis, we used a parametric bootstrap proce-
dure with 20,000 Monte Carlo replications
(Preacher et al., 2010). Bootstrapping results
showed significant positive indirect effects of store
manager servant leadership on store performance,
with the indirect effect � .18 (95% CI: .03, .35).
Thus, Hypothesis 3 was supported.

Our next hypothesis involved a cross-level direct
effect of serving culture on employee identification
with the store. As shown in Figure 1, we found this
relationship to be positive and significant (� � .68,
p � .01). Thus, Hypothesis 4 was supported. More-
over, supporting Hypothesis 5, 20,000 Monte Carlo

the store. None of these additional direct paths was sig-
nificant, suggesting that serving culture fully mediated
the effects of servant leadership on store performance,
individual outcomes, and employee identification with
the store.

FIGURE 1
Cross-Level Servant Leadership Model Results

Unstandardized Path Coefficients for the Hypothesized Model.
* p � .05

** p � .01

1444 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

replications showed that the indirect effect for store
manager servant leadership ¡ serving culture ¡
employee identification with the store was .37
(95% CI: .22, .54). Supporting Hypotheses 6a
through 6d, employee identification with the store
was positively related to in-role performance (� �
.04, p � .05), creativity (� � .06, p � .05), and cus-
tomer service behaviors (� � .06, p � .05), and neg-
atively related to turnover intentions (� � �.23, p �
.01). Hypotheses 7a–7d reflected the direct effects of
serving culture on individual outcomes. Results
show that serving culture was positively related to
in-role performance (� � .35, p � .05), creativity (� �
.43, p � .05), and customer service behaviors (� � .52,
p � .01), and negatively related to turnover intentions
(� � �.53, p � .01). Therefore, Hypotheses 7a
through 7d received full support.

In addition to the direct effects, Hypotheses 8a to
8d proposed a series of multilevel indirect effects
from store serving culture to individual employee
outcomes via employee identification with the store.
With 20,000 Monte Carlo replications, we found that
the indirect effect for serving culture ¡ employee
identification with the store ¡ in-role performance
was .03 (95% CI: .002, .06). The indirect effect for
serving culture ¡ employee identification with the
store ¡ creativity was .02 (95% CI: .01, .07). The
indirect effect for serving culture ¡ employee iden-
tification with the store ¡ customer service behaviors
was .02 (95% CI: .01, .08). The indirect effect for
serving culture ¡ employee identification with the
store ¡ turnover intentions was –.16 (95% CI: –.23,
–.09). Thus, Hypotheses 8a– 8d were supported.

DISCUSSION

Building on prior research, the current investiga-
tion explored mechanisms through which servant
leadership impacts individual effectiveness and
unit (store) performance. Drawing on social learn-
ing theory (Bandura, 1977), we proposed that fol-

lowers model the servant leader behaviors of their
formal leaders, creating a serving culture at the
store level. Modeling of servant leadership occurs
among followers as a result of the qualities that
comprise servant leadership and the leader’s en-
couragement. Servant leaders are characterized as
possessing strong conceptual skills, high levels of
integrity, and concern for followers. These qualities
create desirable role models for followers, such that
they emulate their leaders’ behaviors. Furthermore,
servant leaders actively encourage followers to
model their behavior by emphasizing that they
should also put others’ needs ahead of their own.
Supporting social learning theory, our results re-
vealed a positive relation between servant leader-
ship and serving culture, indicating that there is a
relationship between followers’ perceptions of
their formal leaders’ servant leadership behaviors
and their reports of the degree to which everyone
employed within their store focuses on serving oth-
ers. This finding is noteworthy in that the process
by which servant leadership impacts followers is
through a serving culture, which differs from other
approaches to leadership. Our results suggest that
servant leadership impacts followers through a role
modeling process and in turn, impacts interactions
among all members of the unit. Consequently, ser-
vant leadership operates not only at the individual
or dyadic level between the leader and follower but
also through culture at the unit level. Servant lead-
ership creates norms and expectations for behavior
among followers, which illuminates their other-
orientation motives, resulting in a strong serving
culture and supportive coworker interactions. Im-
portantly, our results revealed that through a serv-
ing culture, servant leadership is positively related
to store/unit performance. Studies have found that
cohesive groups develop a strong collective expec-
tation that members perform behaviors that benefit
the group (e.g., Ehrhart, 2004). Because of a serving
culture, all of those employed by the store support

TABLE 2
Summary of Estimated Indirect Effects

Indirect Paths
Indirect Effects

(95% Confidence Interval)

H3: Store Manager servant leadership ¡ serving culture ¡ store performance .18 (95% CI: .03, .35)
H5: Store Manager servant leadership ¡ serving culture ¡ employee identification with the store .37 (95% CI: .22, .54)
H8a: Serving culture ¡ employee identification with the store ¡ in-role performance .03 (95% CI: .002, .06)
H8b: Serving culture ¡ employee identification with the store ¡ reativity .02 (95% CI: .01, .07)
H8c: Serving culture ¡ employee identification with the store ¡ customer service behaviors .02 (95% CI: .01, .08)
H8d: Serving culture ¡ employee identification with the store ¡ turnover intentions –.16 (95% CI: –.23, –.09)

2014 1445Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

each other and work together to meet customer
needs, thereby enhancing store performance.

While our model posits that serving culture is
related to individual outcomes as well as store-
level outcomes, we argued for the critical role of
employee identification with the store as an under-
lying explanation for why servant leadership is re-
lated to individual outcomes. As noted, for most
individuals, servant leadership includes behaviors
that are desired and viewed positively by others,
especially followers. Leaders who engage in these
behaviors create a culture whereby norms and ex-
pectations are based on being cooperative, caring,
supportive, and trusting. Because most individuals
desire to “fit in” and be accepted by the group,
group norms and expectations often drive em-
ployee behavior. While strong group norms are per-
suasive in terms of guiding behavior, we proposed
and found that employee identification with the
store underlies the linkage between serving culture
and employee outcomes, consistent with social
identity theory (Tajfel, 1972, 1978).

These results underscore that individuals not
only model the behavior of their leader, as pre-
dicted by social learning theory, but also activate
an internal process of identification with their
group that leaves them cognitively attached to their
store, such that they feel a sense of belonging (Ash-
forth & Mael, 1989). Therefore, through the process
of creating a serving culture, leaders highlight the
importance of nurturing group members and pur-
suing unit objectives, which in turn encourages
employees to view themselves as members of the
unit. It may be because of this internal change that
a serving culture impacts a broad set of individual
outcomes, including in-role performance, creativ-
ity, customer service behaviors, and reduced turn-
over intentions—all of which benefit the store. We
therefore contribute to the growing body of re-
search that suggests leaders influence their follow-
ers’ identities (Lord & Brown, 2004).

The positive relationship found between identi-
fication and creativity is critical, as theory suggests
and research has shown that identification does not
always result in positive outcomes. For example,
Pratt (2001) has cautioned that identification can be
negatively related to creativity, because high levels
of identification with a group may engender con-
formity to rules, thus thwarting the exploration of
better ways to execute jobs. Our finding in the
current investigation highlights the feature of ser-
vant leadership that promotes empowerment and
encourages divergent ways of accomplishing tasks.

In essence, when employees identify with their
stores’ serving culture, their identification leads to
creative ways of serving others, including cowork-
ers and customers. Interestingly, Greenleaf (1970)
stressed the leader’s encouragement of followers to
express divergent points of view in his seminal
essay on servant leadership. In line with this argu-
ment, our study shows an additional intermediate
mechanism by which servant leadership impacts
employee creativity (Neubert et al., 2008) and thus
contributes to the creativity literature as well.

The relationship between serving culture, store
identification, and customer service behaviors fol-
lows from the cognitive association with the store
as an in-group to which the individual belongs. The
individual then desires that customers have a pos-
itive experience and think highly of the store. To be
a member of an in-group within a serving culture is
to cognitively associate these servant leader behav-
iors as the “right” ones. In order to avoid cognitive
dissonance, the employee serves not only fellow
employees in the store, but customers as well. This
is notable, as customers may then be cognitively
viewed as members of the in-group. Employees of
service organizations can often, ironically, see cus-
tomers as a burden rather than an opportunity, and
engage in tacit neglect or outright sabotage (Wang,
Liao, Zhan, & Shi, 2011). Our study provides evi-
dence that supports the theoretical view of the ser-
vant leader as valuing multiple stakeholders (here,
the various customers) and suggests that establish-
ing a serving culture and employee identification
with the store may serve as an approach for increas-
ing customer satisfaction.

Strengths and Limitations

Perhaps the strongest feature of our study’s de-
sign was the inclusion of data from five sources:
employees, managers, customers, internal audits by
headquarters, and external audits by consultants.
This design feature greatly reduced the possibility
of results being influenced by same-source com-
mon method bias. Another strength of the investi-
gation was that employee data were collected on
site at each restaurant during paid working hours
by two of the authors. Unlike web-based surveys,
which are typically completed by employees dur-
ing off-work (unpaid) time, our employee partici-
pants completed surveys with a researcher present.
This design feature is likely to have been responsi-
ble for the high response rates obtained. High re-
sponse rates are particularly important in our in-

1446 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

vestigation because several measures were based
on aggregated responses, and aggregation to the
group (store) level is meaningful only when a sub-
stantial percentage of employees complete surveys
(Timmerman, 2005). A final strength of our study
was the organizational setting of chain restaurants,
which was particularly advantageous for testing
our multilevel model given that individuals
worked within a single store and thus were mem-
bers of a clearly designated group with little or no
contact with other groups.

One weakness of our study was the cross-sec-
tional design, which precludes our ability to make
causal inferences. For example, it is possible that
individual employee behaviors influenced culture
perceptions, which in turn encouraged leaders to
reinforce the culture with continued engagement in
servant leader behaviors. However, given the for-
mal position power of the leader, we believe the
causal direction as depicted in our model is more
likely. Longitudinal research is necessary to ascer-
tain the validity of our contentions regarding the
causal relations among the variables. Another
weakness of our study is our operationalization of
servant leadership and serving culture. Owing to
survey length limitations, we were unable to in-
clude the full 28 items for both constructs on the
survey, but instead used a 7-item short form. Al-
though evidence from an independent sample in-
dicates that the content domains of these constructs
are assessed, we have been unable to analyze the
dimensions of servant leadership and serving cul-
ture. An additional limitation of these two mea-
sures is that they overlap in content, given that the
serving culture items refer to the overall degree to
which managers and employees engaged in the
same behaviors that were assessed in the servant
leadership scale for which the referent was the
store manager exclusively. Even though the corre-
lation between these two measures (r � .69) does not
suggest redundancy, the theoretical overlap between
the two makes it difficult to isolate the degree to
which leaders’ behaviors influenced the behaviors of
followers. Another limitation of the serving culture
measure is that it focuses on behavioral norms and
not the full domain of culture, such as one that also
captures aspects of culture (e.g., values and artifacts).

Implications for Practice

Several trends in organizations around the globe
indicate that servant leadership will become pro-
gressively more relevant. The increasing size of the

service sector combined with escalating levels of
competition point to the need for leadership ap-
proaches that are best suited toward developing
employees so that their full potential is realized. As
employees’ education levels increase, autocratic
leadership approaches will no longer be tolerated.
Instead, employees expect a more personal, indi-
vidualized, and cooperative leadership style. Ser-
vant leadership, with its inherent prioritization of
fulfilling follower needs, offers promise in fulfilling
the expectations of followers. The beneficial out-
comes continue as followers adopt a focus on helping
others and contributing to meeting goals that satisfy
the needs of multiple stakeholders, including cus-
tomers, other employees, management, and commu-
nities in which the organization is embedded.

In order to realize these benefits of servant lead-
ership, it is important for managers to realize that
servant leadership is more than creating a pleasant
work atmosphere, as this form of leadership posi-
tively relates to performance-related outcomes. Be-
cause of increased span of control and demands
on leaders’ time, leaders are often unable to con-
stantly be present or visible to followers. Yet, when a
serving culture exists, the desired behaviors are en-
couraged and maintained through coworker interac-
tions. In this way, servant leadership creates a self-
perpetuating cycle, such that followers engage in
these behaviors with each other to the point whereby
the norms and expectations within the group impact
employee behaviors that drive performance. Thus, it
is imperative that managers be trained to adopt ser-
vant leadership behaviors. While some leaders will
more easily gravitate toward servant leadership than
other managers (see Peterson et al., 2012), training
should be able to move the distribution of servant
leadership behaviors towards greater engagement in
these behaviors by all managers.

Another practical implication of the current
study is that servant leadership goes beyond simply
enhancing employee commitment and compliance,
and it does this by increasing employee identifica-
tion with the store or organization. Thus, managers
should be encouraged to engage in servant leader
behaviors, because these behaviors can create a work
culture that not only increases followers’ affective
attachment to the group but also promotes followers’
cognitive acceptance of the group’s values.

Future Research

There are several avenues for future research
based on the results of our study. In explaining the

2014 1447Liden, Wayne, Liao, and Meuser

relation between serving culture and store perfor-
mance, we argued that followers or employees not
only engage in servant leadership with each other but
also with customers, thereby increasing the quality of
customer service. Future research is needed to di-
rectly assess this contention as to whether serving
culture increases employee servant leadership to-
ward customers, given that we measured employee
customer service behaviors but did not directly
measure employee servant leadership. This also
speaks to the perpetuation process of servant lead-
ership in terms of how servant leaders develop
among followers.

While we argued for the critical role of serving
culture in explaining outcomes, other group phe-
nomena have been shown to mediate the relation
between servant leadership and individual and
group outcomes. For example, justice climate and
team potency have been found to mediate the rela-
tion between servant leadership and group-level
OCB (Ehrhart, 2004; Hu & Liden, 2011), as well as
OCB at the individual level (Walumbwa et al.,
2010). This growing area of research would benefit
from clearer elucidation of the relative importance
of these mediators with respect to the outcome of
interest.

Another direction for future research is to ascer-
tain the generalizability of our findings with a pro-
fessional sample in a different industry. While the
relationships in our model were supported, it may be
that the customer-oriented nature of the business in-
creased the importance of servant leadership and the
resulting service culture, which supports serving the
needs of others, including customers. The restau-
rants also were composed of highly interdependent
positions, which likely facilitated the contagion of
servant leadership among coworkers.

An additional way in which to extend and en-
hance the generalizability of our results, which
were based on a sample of 7% female and 93%
male leaders, is to examine servant leadership with
a sample consisting of a larger percentage of
women leaders. With a greater representation of
women leaders, it would be possible to explore
whether follower reactions to servant leadership
varies based on the sex of the leader. An interesting
paradox may exist here: research on women and
leadership suggests that women generally have a
more democratic, collaborative, and participative
leadership style (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & van
Engen, 2003); furthermore, women are more trans-
formational compared with male leaders, espe-
cially in terms of mentoring and developing col-

leagues (Eagly et al., 2003). These findings suggest
that female leaders may be more likely to engage in
servant leadership. Yet, female servant leaders may
benefit less from engaging in servant leadership
because of people’s stereotypes of effective leaders
which emphasize masculine qualities, also referred
to as “think manager, think male” (Eagly & Karau,
2002; Schein, 1973). Drawing on role congruity the-
ory (Eagly & Karau, 2002), we encourage future
research on how leader sex impacts follower re-
sponses to servant leadership.

While our results indicate support for employee
identification as an explanatory mechanism for the
relation between serving culture and individual
outcomes, the indirect effects were small for in-role
performance, creativity, and customer service be-
haviors, but moderate for turnover intentions. Fur-
thermore, the direct relationship between serving
culture and individual outcomes also received
strong support. Thus, rather than employee identi-
fication fully mediating the serving culture to indi-
vidual outcome relation, our results provide evi-
dence of only partial mediation. Extending these
findings, we encourage future research to uncover
additional mediators that enhance our understand-
ing of how and why serving culture at the group
level impacts individual-level outcomes. Although
we have argued for identification as the explanatory
mechanism based on social identity theory (Tajfel,
1972, 1978), it may be that a serving culture relates to
individual outcomes through other mechanisms,
such as enhanced feelings of trust and empowerment
(Liden et al., 2014; van Dierendonck, 2011).

Finally, researchers have lamented the lack of
theoretical integration of the plethora of leadership
theories that exist in the literature (Avolio, 2007;
Lord, Brown, Harvey, & Hall, 2001). Indeed, re-
searchers have noted the theoretical overlap be-
tween many leadership theories, including authen-
tic leadership, charismatic leadership, ethical
leadership, humble leadership, the path– goal the-
ory of leadership, servant leadership, spiritual
leadership, and transformational leadership (Avo-
lio & Gardner, 2005; Brown & Treviño, 2006; Fry,
2003; Owens & Hekman, 2012). Researchers have
begun to address this shortcoming of leadership
research. For example, integration work has been
undertaken in the area of transformational and
trait-based approaches (DeRue, Nahrgang, Well-
man, & Humphrey, 2011). Researchers should con-
tinue this integration work, which is critical for
advancing leadership research.

1448 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

CONCLUSION

Servant leadership is at an early stage of theoret-
ical development. While there is a growing body of
empirical evidence that this form of leadership has
the potential to increase follower behavioral and
attitudinal outcomes, limited attention has been
devoted to uncovering the underlying mechanisms
for how and why this occurs. Through a multilevel
study design involving data collected from several
sources, our study has extended the development
of servant leadership theory. Our results offer
promise for role modeling and social identity the-
ories as key explanatory mechanisms based on our
demonstration that serving culture and follower
identification with the store were related to our
outcomes of interest.

Building on our results, we encourage future re-
search on the process by which servant leadership
impacts followers and their organizations in order
to further develop the theoretical basis of servant
leadership.

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Robert C. Liden (bobliden@uic.edu) is Professor of Man-
agement, Coordinator of the Organizational Behavior and
Human Resource Management doctoral program, and Di-
rector of Doctoral Programs for the College of Business
Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He received his PhD at the University of Cincinnati. His
research focuses on interpersonal processes within the
context of such topics as leadership, groups, and career
progression.

Sandy J. Wayne (sjwayne@uic.edu) is Professor of Man-
agement at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She
received her PhD in management from Texas A&M Uni-
versity. Her research focuses on understanding relation-
ships in the workplace, including the antecedents and
consequences of employee–leader and employee– organ-
ization relationships.

Chenwei Liao (cliao@msu.edu) is an Assistant Professor
in the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at
Michigan State University. He received his PhD at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on
leadership, leader–follower relationships, employment
arrangements, and employment relationships.

Jeremy D. Meuser (jmeuse2@uic.edu) is a PhD student in
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Manage-
ment at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research
focuses on leadership, identity, and identification.

1452 OctoberAcademy of Management Journal

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