Closing the leadership circle: Building and testing a contingent theory of servant leadership

Lemoine, Gerald James

Title:

Closing the leadership circle: Building and testing a contingent theory of servant leadership

dc.contributor.advisor	Blum, Terry C.
dc.contributor.advisor	Parsons, Charles K.
dc.contributor.author	Lemoine, Gerald James
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Kim, Eugene
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Liu, Dong
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Bennett, Nate
dc.contributor.department	Business
dc.date.accessioned	2015-09-21T14:24:41Z
dc.date.available	2015-09-21T14:24:41Z
dc.date.created	2015-08
dc.date.issued	2015-05-14
dc.date.submitted	August 2015
dc.date.updated	2015-09-21T14:24:42Z
dc.description.abstract	Servant leadership focuses on stakeholder concern and follower development and empowerment. It has begun to emerge as a useful perspective of leadership within academic research, but theoretical development remains limited, and some of its key propositions have not been tested. In this dissertation I build and test a theory of how servant leadership works, why it works, and when it works. Drawing on the extant servant leadership literature, a social learning perspective, and research on gender roles and schemas, I propose a conceptual definition and theory of how servant leadership impacts two characteristics of followers (prosocial motivation and psychological capital) to affect distal outcomes including voice and performance. I also test servant leadership's impact on the spread of servant leadership behaviors to followers, a key proposition of servant leadership for nearly fifty years which has never been empirically tested. Further, I propose gender and gender schemas as potential moderators of servant leadership, arguing that the more communal emphasis of this approach may interact with sex role factors to impact its effectiveness, such that females may actually have an advantage in using servant leadership, as opposed to the implicit masculine advantage in other leadership behaviors. To answer these research questions, I conducted a temporally lagged multi-organizational study testing the mediators, moderators, and outcomes of servant leadership. Using a variance decomposition approach to clustered and cross-level interactions in an HLM framework, I find substantial support for my theoretical predictions. Results support the idea that exposure to servant leadership behaviors is associated with all three performance outcomes, including an employee's own enactment of servant leadership, both directly and through the mediating effects of positive psychological capital. These effects were contingent as hypothesized, such that servant leadership was more powerful when used by a female manager, and when experienced by individuals with high female gender schemas. Theoretical and practical implications of these conclusions, as well as future research suggested by these results, are discussed.
dc.description.degree	Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/53862
dc.language.iso	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject	Leadership
dc.subject	Servant leadership
dc.subject	Gender
dc.subject	Social learning
dc.subject	Prosocial
dc.subject	Gender schemas
dc.subject	Voice
dc.subject	Performance
dc.subject	Psychological capital
dc.title	Closing the leadership circle: Building and testing a contingent theory of servant leadership
dc.type	Text
dc.type.genre	Dissertation
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.advisor	Parsons, Charles K.
local.contributor.advisor	Blum, Terry C.
local.contributor.corporatename	Scheller College of Business
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication	b5f4d945-2f54-464e-9b8b-711de478c33c
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication	d470f30b-186d-477d-ab6d-b3ebe94951ff
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication	a2f83831-ae41-4d65-82ff-c8bf95db4ffb
thesis.degree.level	Doctoral