An exceptional recent study of 815 employees and 123 supervisors published in the Journal of Applied Psychology makes a very strong argument for the value of servant leadership at work.
The authors found that the practice of servant leadership had important implications for both individuals and the groups they worked in. The study found that servant leadership enhanced both the self-efficacy and the commitment to the supervisor of the individual employee. At the group level, servant leadership lead to employees’ perception that they were treated fairly (justice climate) and the shared perception customer service was expected, supported, and rewarded (positive service climate). These individual and group effects combined to produce a significant impact on the organisational citizenship behaviour of individual employees.
Employees that are good organisational citizens go above and beyond their formal job descriptions. If everyone in an organisation only did what was required of them, the organisation would be mediocre at best. Organisational excellence requires a critical mass of employees doing more than what is officially recognised and rewarded. The extant research has demonstrated organisational citizenship behaviour is strongly associated with employee task performance, organisational productivity, and customer satisfaction.
