Supervisory servant leadership and employee’s work role performance: A multilevel mediation model

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether employee’s perceived organizational support and organizational identification (OID) have a mediating role in the relationship between supervisor’s servant leadership and employee’s organization member performance.

The sample used in this study consists of 181 salespeople and 83 sales managers. The model entails a cross-level mediation process that was tested using dyadic data and multilevel structural equation modeling.

Findings show that sales managers’ servant leadership is directly and positively related to salespeople’s organization member performance. In addition, sales managers’ servant leadership is indirectly related to salespeople’s organization member performance through the salespeople’s perceived organizational support – salespeople’s OID chain.

In order to increase employee’s organizational member performance, employees with a “we” mentality and who feel the need to serve should be selected for and promoted to supervisors. To enhance employees’ perceived organizational support and OID is also important, as these factors will encourage employees to behave in the best interest of the organization.

This is the first study to provide evidence for the relationship between servant leadership and organization member performance, as well as the mediating roles of employee’s perceived organizational support and OID on this relationship.