How does a servant leader fuel the service fire? A multilevel model of servant leadership, individual self identity, group competition climate, and customer service performance.

Abstract

Building on a social identity framework, our cross-level process model explains how a manager's servant leadership affects frontline employees' service performance, measured as service quality, customer-focused citizenship behavior, and customer-oriented prosocial behavior. Among a sample of 238 hairstylists in 30 salons and 470 of their customers, we found that hair stylists' self-identity embedded in the group, namely, self-efficacy and group identification, partially mediated the positive effect of salon managers' servant leadership on stylists' service performance as rated by the customers, after taking into account the positive influence of transformational leadership. Moreover, group competition climate strengthened the positive relationship between self-efficacy and service performance.

The Functions of a Servant Leader

“…Other findings reported that servant leadership enhanced self-efficacy [46,86], person-job fit [59], person-organisational fit [12], and leader-member exchange [22,75,79].…”

“…The first study showed a direct positive relationship with group identification [86]. A second study reported that a serving culture mediated the relationship between servant leadership and employee identification [23].…”

“…Servant leadership was positively related to customer service performance [86], service-orientated organisational citizenship behaviour, customer value co-creation [78], customer trust in the firm, customer satisfaction [64], customer orientation [12], customer serving behaviour [23], and value enhancing behaviour [88]. Servant leadership was also negatively related to customer turnover [45].…”

“…Servant leadership was also negatively related to customer turnover [45]. Mediating variables in the aforementioned relationships were social identity [86], positive psychological capital, service-orientated organisational citizenship behaviour [78], employee trust [64], and a caring ethical climate [88].…”

A servant leader and their stakeholders: When does organizational structure enhance a leader's influence?

“…However, despite the aim of servant leaders to make an impact beyond the organization or its members, there is limited research supporting this assertion. Two notable exceptions demonstrate that servant leadership influences hair salon (Chen, Zhu, & Zhou, 2015) and restaurant customers , but to our knowledge no research exists exploring patients; patients differ from patrons of hair salons and restaurants in representing stakeholders who generally provide larger per person revenues to the organization and whose dissatisfaction may provide a greater risk in lawsuits or regulatory inquiries.…”