Are servant leaders appreciated? An investigation of how relational attributions influence employee feelings of gratitude and prosocial behaviors

Sun, Jiaqing; Liden, Robert C.; Ouyang, Linyi

doi:10.1002/job.2354

Cited by 70 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Support managers' service can be particularly useful to line managers because support managers' work typically focuses on dealing with administrative, relational, or technical issues that could significantly burden the line managers, whose main focus is on business operations. In this regard, Sun, Liden, and Ouyang (2019) showed that servant leadership leads to positive outcomes by increasing gratitude in followers. Support managers' servant leadership might also enhance line managers' ability to exhibit servant leadership.…”

Section: The Trickle Effects Emanating From the Servant Leadership Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serving to Help and Helping to Serve: Using Servant Leadership to Influence Beyond Supervisory Relationships

Kauppila

Ehrnrooth

Mäkelä

et al. 2021

Journal of Management

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This study provides a new perspective on servant leadership research by examining the social influence of the servant leadership of individuals who are not in a supervisory position. Drawing on servant leadership and social learning theories, we examine how the servant leadership of managers in support roles can initiate a social learning process that shapes the leadership style of line managers and thereby influences employee outcomes throughout the organization. To facilitate the integration between servant leadership and social learning theories, we also examine the role of efficacy beliefs in enhancing the effectiveness of the social learning process. Using nested, time-lagged data from 667 store managers, 121 line managers, and 23 human resource managers (i.e., support managers), we find that support managers’ servant leadership positively influences organizational members’ perceptions of overall justice and leader-member exchange through line manager servant leadership. In turn, employees’ favorable perceptions stemming from line manager servant leadership enhance the employees’ organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The results also indicate that high leadership self-efficacy augments line managers’ effectiveness in emulating servant leadership behaviors from support managers and reinforces the indirect effects on organizational members’ favorable perceptions.

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Section: The Trickle Effects Emanating From the Servant Leadership Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serving to Help and Helping to Serve: Using Servant Leadership to Influence Beyond Supervisory Relationships

Kauppila

Ehrnrooth

Mäkelä

et al. 2021

Journal of Management

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show abstract

“…In the first paper, Sun, Liden, and Ouyang () examine a moderated mediation model of the indirect effect of servant leadership on upward voice through gratitude and organizational citizenship behavior toward individuals, conditional upon relational attributions. Sun et al tested their model with multisource data collected from 137 Chinese social workers and their leaders across three phases.…”

Section: An Overview Of the Papers In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Altogether, these five papers extend attribution theory in numerous areas of critical importance, including micro contexts and macro contexts in organizational behavior, leadership, human resource management, and strategic management. The varying study designs used across Munyon et al's (), Hewett et al's (), and Sun et al's () papers illuminate the myriad of opportunities to empirically examine attributions. Additionally, the cross‐cultural findings from employee respondents in organizations located in China, Great Britain, and the United States show that attributions apply to a range of contexts.…”

Section: An Overview Of the Papers In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Significant progress has also been made in developing and adapting attribution theory to organizational contexts. In this special issue, three of the articles (Carson, 2019;Gardner et al, 2019;Sun et al, 2019) focused on variations of relationship attributions. This focus appeared to be, in part, as a response to the recent conceptual and empirical work by Eberly and her colleagues (Eberly et al, 2011;Eberly, Holley, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2017).…”

Section: Impressions Reflections and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attribution theory: An introduction to the special issue

Martinko

Mackey

2019

J Organ Behavior

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Summary This special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior was developed to further extend attribution theory and its application to the field of organizational behavior. In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the motivation for this special issue, a concise summary of the papers included in it, a discussion about progress toward the field's goals, and suggestions for how future research can move the field forward. In doing so, we describe how applying attribution theory to studies that utilize a broad range of study designs, research contexts, and focal topics results in insights that enhance our understanding of how attributional processes predict and explain individuals' emotions and behaviors. We also provide suggestions for how to further develop attribution theory so we can more clearly describe the generalizability of relationships across a wide variety of organizational contexts.

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“…The relationship between organizational resources and employee outcomes has been a frequent topic in several research streams, including recent works in the organizational behavior literature (Sun et al, 2019;Verma, 2019), organizational communication literature (AL-Hashimi and Al-Barri, 2018;Men and Yue, 2019) and the FLE management literature (Ford et al, 2018;Grant and Wrzesniewski, 2010;Stegen and Wankier, 2018). For example, works based on the job demands-resources theory (JD-R) in the organizational behavior literature have identified core job resources (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When do frontline service employees feel more grateful?

Wang

Koerber³

2020

EJM

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Purpose Drawing from the social exchange theory, the job demands-resources theory and the employee–organization relationship framework, this article aims to investigate underlying mechanisms through which organizational resources impact frontline service employees’ (FLEs) core service performance and customer-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Design/methodology/approach An empirical study was conducted based on a multi-source data from 211 employee–customer pairs, with structural equation modeling used to test hypotheses. Findings FLE felt gratitude toward the firm fully mediates the impacts of supervisory guidance and employee-oriented relationship investment in influencing employees’ service performance and customer-oriented OCB. The study further finds that when the perceived job autonomy is low, providing supervisory guidance is more effective in eliciting employee gratitude than employee-oriented relationship investments. In contrast, when the perceived job autonomy is high, employee-oriented relationship investment elicits higher employee gratitude than supervisory guidance. Research limitations/implications First, as cross-sectional pair data were used to test the proposed hypotheses, a stronger case might be made for the use of longitudinal data. Second, the current study uses a large variety of industries to study the phenomenon of employee gratitude and customer-oriented performance. Third, given recent globalization trends, it is increasingly important for researchers to address how the knowledge gained within an US context is applicable on a global scale. Finally, the two types of organizational resources included in the study are both positive resources. Practical implications The findings offer insights about how firms can strategically invest organizational resources to favorably influence FLE gratitude and customer outcomes as well as how job autonomy plays a role in leveraging the impacts of those resources. Originality/value This study is one of the few to advance our understanding of how FLE felt gratitude serves as an intervening mechanism through which functional and social resources invested by service organizations lead to desirable customer outcomes. In addition, this study explores the moderating role of FLE perceived job autonomy, suggesting the contingent nature of organizational resources in affecting customer-oriented FLE behaviors, which was rarely attended in previous research.

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Are servant leaders appreciated? An investigation of how relational attributions influence employee feelings of gratitude and prosocial behaviors

Cited by 70 publications

References 73 publications

Serving to Help and Helping to Serve: Using Servant Leadership to Influence Beyond Supervisory Relationships

Serving to Help and Helping to Serve: Using Servant Leadership to Influence Beyond Supervisory Relationships

Attribution theory: An introduction to the special issue

When do frontline service employees feel more grateful?

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