Abstract:

This paper focuses on the detrimental effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves and their subordinates. The paper conducts a literature review on the concept and achievements of servant leadership. This paper explores the detrimental effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves and the mitigating mechanisms using role stress, resource allocation of self-control, and conservation of resources as theoretical bases. We also explore the detrimental effects of servant leadership on subordinates and the mitigating mechanisms based on implicit followership, leader-member exchange, and leadership prototypes theories. Moreover, future research directions regarding research levels, methods, perspectives and contents are discussed. It is our hope that this paper will encourage both researchers and practitioners to understand how and when the detrimental effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves and subordinates occur, and provide theoretical guidance for future empirical research on the detrimental effects of servant leadership.

The main contributions of this paper include:

First, compared with a primary focus on the value of servant leadership on employees, teams or organizations, this paper focuses on the detrimental effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves (e.g., leaders’ role stress, ego depletion, job burnout, and negative leadership behavior).

Second, based on conservation of resources theory, this paper comprehensively discusses the mitigating mechanisms on the negative effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves from both organizational and individual levels. This paper first proposes that servant organizational culture may mitigate the negative effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves, that is, when organizational culture embraces servant, servant leaders are more likely to obtain organizational support to help more and broader service objects, and thus are more likely to offset the resource loss resulted from serving others. Therefore, servant organizational culture can alleviate the negative effects of servant leadership on leaders themselves, such as role stress, ego depletion. In addition, this paper firstly proposes the moderation of leaders’ positive psychological capital on the negative effects of servant leadership, that is, leaders’ positive psychological capital helps leaders maintain more positive emotions, recover resilience faster when facing of difficulties, and deal with job stress more effectively. Thus, it can alleviate the effects of servant leadership on leaders’ negative outcomes.

Third, this paper discusses the influence of servant leadership on subordinates’ citizenship pressure based on implicit followership theory and leader-member exchange theory, and proposes the moderation of subordinates’ leadership preference on the relationship between servant leadership and subordinates’ citizenship pressure according to leadership prototypes theory, differing from the extant literature’s restricted focus on the positive effect of servant leadership on subordinates. That is, subordinates’ recognition of servant Leadership may alleviate the negative impact of servant leadership on subordinates’ citizenship pressure.

Fourth, we propose the future research directions from the perspective of dynamism, that is using research methods of dynamic leadership behavior (e.g., trend and variability) to explore the short- and long-term negative effects of servant leadership on subordinates, teams, organizations, and other stakeholders.

Key words: servant leadership, negative effects, role stress, ego depletion, citizenship pressure