How servant leadership creates and accumulates social capital personally owned in hotel firms

This paper aims to test whether servant leaders lead followers to socially interact more frequently, closely and personally with peers, and if this social interaction links servant leaders with employees’ personal social capital, both in terms of bonding (networks linking employees of a similar kind) and bridging (networks linking agents of different kinds).

Data were collected from 403 employees from 59 large Spanish hotels. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that servant leadership has a positive effect on bonding and bridging, which is mediated by employees’ social interactions with peers inside and outside their groups, respectively.

The findings suggest that hotel managers should adopt servant leadership to facilitate social interactions at work, thus allowing employees to individually gain personal assets that improve the hotel’s social capital resources.

This is the first study to analyze whether servant leadership shapes personal social capital in business settings. Moreover, it is the first to show the mechanisms (social interactions with peers inside and outside their groups) through which managerial servant leadership encourages this valuable personal asset in hotels.