Individual differences in servant leadership: the roles of values and personality

Abstract

Purpose: The paper seeks to address the lack of empirical research on servant leadership by investigating relationships between servant leadership and four individual differences – values of empathy, integrity, and competence and the five‐factor model's personality factor of agreeableness. Design/methodology/approach: Dennis and Winston's servant leadership scale (a revision of Page and Wong's servant leadership instrument), Braithwaite and Law's Goal and Mode Values Inventories, Mayer and Davis' integrity scale, and Costa and McCrae's NEO Five‐Factor Inventory were used with 288 followers and 126 leaders in three organizations in order to measure relationships between followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership, followers' ratings of leaders' values of empathy, integrity, and competence and leaders' ratings of their own agreeableness. Findings: Followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership were positively related to followers' ratings of leaders' values of empathy, integrity, and competence. Followers' ratings of leaders' servant leadership were also positively related to leaders' ratings of their own agreeableness. Research limitations/implications: Common method bias is a potential limitation due to respondents' tendency toward consistency in responses. Practical implications: Organizations embracing servant leadership may benefit from selecting leaders partly on the basis of certain personal attributes such as those investigated in the present study. Furthermore, in order to maintain a servant leadership culture and to retain leaders in a servant leadership organization, recruiters and trainers in servant leadership organizations would likely benefit from communicating accurate information about attributes valued in a servant leadership culture – e.g. attributes explored in the present research. Originality/value: The study extends our understanding of servant leadership research by offering support for individual attributes related to the practice of servant leadership.