The past decade has witnessed growing interests in empirically examining the effectiveness of servant leadership in management research. Our study reviews the literature on servant leadership and analyzes the relationship between servant leadership and outcome variables. Drawing on social exchange theory, this study uses meta-analysis to find that servant leadership is positively related to followers' job-related outcomes (e.g., psychological empowerment, organizational commitment, service quality), leader-related outcomes (e.g., leader effectiveness), and group-related outcomes (e.g., group service performance). Further, we find that the relationships between servant leadership and its outcomes are moderated by cultural factors (i.e., traditionality, masculinity, individualism, and power distance). Finally, we examine the incremental validity of servant leadership by taking transformational leadership into account and comparing their effects on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) via leader-member exchange (LMX). Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and an agenda for future research is proposed.

Drawing upon socioanalytic theory of personality, we hypothesize and test inverted U-shaped relationships between team members’ assertiveness and warmth (labeled as the “getting ahead” and “getting along” facets of extraversion) and peers’ reactions (i.e., advice seeking by peers and peer liking, respectively) that, in turn, predict members’ emergence as informal leaders in self-managed teams. Integrating research on prosocial motivation, we also examine whether prosocially motivated members have more enhanced positive curvilinear influences of assertiveness and warmth on peer reactions. Based on 223 members in 69 student project teams (Study 1) and 337 employees in 79 self-managed work teams (Study 2), we found support for the inverted U-shaped relationships between assertiveness and advice seeking by peers, and between warmth and peer liking. Further, prosocial motivation enhances the inverted U-shaped effect of assertiveness in Study 2 and those effects of warmth in both studies. Advice seeking by peers and peer liking, in turn, were positively related to leadership emergence in both studies. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for dispositional and motivational factors that shape peer reactions and facilitate leadership emergence in teams.

a school of Business, east china university of science and Technology, shanghai, china; b research Institute of economics and management, southwestern university of finance and economics, chengdu, china; c school of management, university of new south Wales, sydney, australia; d school of Business administration, southwestern university of finance and economics, chengdu, china ABSTRACT Based on a survey of a sample of employees (n = 726), we examine whether work-to-family enrichment mediates the relationship between two types of flexible work arrangements (i.e. flextime and a compressed workweek) and two workrelated outcomes (job satisfaction and turnover intention). In addition, we examine the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between flexible work arrangements and workto-family enrichment and between work-to-family enrichment and the work-related outcomes. The results show that workto-family enrichment acts as a mediating factor between flexible work arrangements and outcomes. In addition, the relationship between work-to-family enrichment and turnover intention is stronger for female employees. Finally, the implications for research and practice are discussed.

How do supervisors who treat the bottom line as more important than anything else influence team success? Drawing from social information processing theory, we explore how and when supervisor bottom-line mentality (i.e., an exclusive focus on bottom-line outcomes at the expense of other priorities) exerts influence on the bottom-line itself, in the form of team performance. We argue that a supervisor’s bottom-line mentality provides significant social cues for the team that securing bottom-line objectives is of sole importance, which stimulates team performance avoidance goal orientation, and thus decreases team performance. Further, we argue performing tension (i.e., tension between contradictory needs, demands, and goals), serving as team members’ mutual perception of the confusing environment, will strengthen the indirect negative relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and team performance through team performance avoidance goal orientation. We conduct a path analysis using data from 258 teams in a Chinese food-chain company, which provides support for our hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that supervisor’s exclusive focus on the bottom-line can serve to impede team performance. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

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