The Impact of Servant Leadership Behaviors on Trust and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

The premise of this study is that the behavior of the organizational leader affects employee outcomes. More specifically, I seek to examine the relationship between Servant Leadership behaviors and employee organizational citizenship behaviors – both OCB-I (behaviors targeted towards an individual, such as altruism) and OCB-O (behaviors that directly affect the organization as a whole, such as civic virtue). I propose that this relationship is mediated by employees’ trust in their leader. This study adopts McAllister’s (1995) theoretical construct of trust, which distinguishes between the two dimensions of affect-based trust (rooted in emotion) and cognition-based trust (rooted in reason). Moreover, I propose that the link between trust in the leader and employee organizational citizenship behavior is moderated by the well-being of the employees. In the present research, the well-being of the employees will be assessed on three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (also referred to as burnout), life satisfaction as well as job satisfaction. The results revealed that Servant Leadership is positively and significantly correlated with employee organizational citizenship behavior. Additionally, only cognitive-based trust partially mediated that relationship. Contrary to expectations, employee well-being was not found to significantly moderate the relationship between trust in the leader and organizational citizenship behavior. Overall, the present study contributes to the leadership literature by establishing a link between servant leadership and employee OCB through the medium of trust. From a practical standpoint, the results of this study would benefit companies as a whole by raising the awareness the managers regarding the employee outcomes that their behaviors may cause, as trust and OCB are related to many positive employee outcomes (such as lower transaction cost, decreased turnover, increased motivation and commitment etc…) that can grant companies a competitive advantage.