Servant Leadership and Follower Job Performance: The Mediating Effect of Public Service Motivation

Abstract

This article advances our understanding of the effects of servant leadership, an employee-and community-focused leadership style, on followers' public service motivation (PSM) and job performance. Based on social learning theory, we argue that by emphasizing to their followers the importance of serving others both inside and outside the organization and by acting as role models by serving others themselves, servant leaders enhance job performance by engendering higher PSM in their followers. A multilevel analysis of three waves of multi-source data from a Chinese government agency reveals that PSM mediates the influence that servant leadership has on followers' job performance. The results are consistent with theoretical predictions that the altruistic behaviour displayed by servant leaders elicits higher levels of the altruistic behaviours that characterize PSM, which in turn increases job performance. Hence, this study contributes to our understanding of how leadership drives institutional change and performance in the public sector. INTRODUCTIONFaced with a turbulent and uncertain operating environment (Boin and 't Hart 2003), the pressure 'to do more with less' has left many public service organizations with the task of redefining their traditional roles and responsibilities (Vermeeren et al. 2014). This requirement has led them to examine effective methods of increasing performance (Fernandez and Moldogaziev 2011). Public service motivation (PSM), defined as 'an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations ' (Perry and Wise 1990, p. 368), has generally been found to increase job performance amongst employees (Bright 2007;Vandenabeele 2009;Bellé 2013). With this finding in mind, the impact that leaders have on raising PSM to drive performance has received increasing attention in the literature (Wright et al. 2012).Leadership has been broadly defined as 'an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes ' (Rost 1993, p. 124). Over the last two decades, researchers have begun to examine the specific leadership behaviours exhibited by supervisors and how they influence employee attitudes and behaviours (Van Wart 2013). In line with this behavioural approach to leadership research, the present study examines the role of servant leadership in enhancing the job performance of followers through fostering higher levels of PSM in the Chinese public sector. This style of leadership, in which leaders strive selflessly to assist others before themselves and encourage their followers to do the same (Greenleaf 1977), has been the focus of recent research in the Chinese public sector (Han et al. 2010;Miao et al. 2014). In his essay The Institution as Servant, Greenleaf (1972, p. 5) states that 'individuals who want to serve must, on their own, become institution builders where they are'. Following Greenleaf, we argue that servant leaders are institutional entrepreneurs (DiMaggio 1988)...

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