servant leadership research articles

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Servant Leadership: a Systematic Literature Review and Network Analysis

Alice canavesi.

1 Business Economics, Carlo Cattaneo University (LIUC), Castellanza, Italy

Eliana Minelli

2 Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

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Servant leadership is a form of moral-based leadership where leaders tend to prioritize the fulfillment of the needs of followers, namely employees, customers and other stakeholders, rather than satisfying their personal needs. Although the concept is not new among both academics and practitioners, it has received growing consideration in the last decade, due to the fact that it can positively affect a series of individual and organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. In particular, the latest trend in literature has focused on the identification of the antecedents, mediating and moderating mechanisms at the basis of this relationship, as well as on the development of a common scale to measure the construct across diverse economic and cultural contexts. The purpose of this paper is to depict the evolution of the scientific literature that has developed on the concept, to identify the main criticalities and provide avenues for future research. A dynamic methodology called “Systematic Literature Network Analysis” has been applied, combining the Systematic Literature Review approach with the analysis of bibliographic networks.

Introduction

With the beginning of the twenty-first century, the moral nature of leaders has started to be considered not only necessary for the good of society but also essential for sustainable organizational success (Freeman et al., 2004 ; Gulati et al., 2010 ; Padilla et al., 2007 ), thus marking a considerable shift in research. As a consequence, moral leadership theories, such as transformational, ethical, authentic and servant leadership, have recently received considerable attention from the scientific community.

Servant leadership seems to be the most promising and most investigated over the last few years, especially due to the holistic approach and broad focus adopted compared to the other philosophies, as well as to its important role in affecting individual and team-level outcomes, such as organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour, job performance and job satisfaction. Like most other leadership constructs, the definition and measurement of servant leadership were primarily developed in the United States. In particular, the term servant leadership was coined by Greenleaf in 1970 in his essay “The Servant as Leader" to describe an emerging style of leadership where leaders focused on followers’ personal growth and development, by treating them in an ethical way. The author asserted that the servant leader is “primus inter pares” or “first among equals”, meaning that his/her highest priority is service to others in order to fulfill their needs, rather than fulfilling his or her personal needs. Greenleaf’s conception was then refined by many other scholars, such as Ehrhart ( 2004 ), who claimed that servant leadership is one in which the leader goes beyond the financial success of the organization recognizing his or her moral responsibility towards subordinates, customers and the entire company’s community. The emphasis of the servant leadership philosophy has been placed over time on serving and creating value for multiple stakeholders, both internal and external to the organization. Liden et al. ( 2008 ) further stressed the fundamental leadership behaviours of servant leadership, such as behaving ethically, helping followers grow and succeed, empowering, emotional healing, conceptual skills and creating value for the community.

Research on servant leadership can be categorized into three main phases: a first phase focusing on its conceptual development, a second phase investigating the measures and testing the relationships with some fundamental outcomes via cross-sectional research, and a third phase aimed at understanding the antecedents, mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions of servant leadership. The last “model development phase” is the most recent and has seen a proliferation of studies in the last twenty years. A significant contribution to provide an integrative theoretical framework has been recently made by Eva et al. ( 2019 ), who offered a clear conceptual distinction of servant leadership compared to other approaches, evaluated and assessed the most rigorous scales of the construct developed so far, and highlighted the most important antecedents, outcomes, moderating and mediating mechanisms identified in the literature.

The purpose of this research is to provide a further and complementary review of the literature on servant leadership through bibliometric methods, in order to assess the evolution of the field over time as well as the current state-of-art on the key trends and provide avenues for future research. In particular, the authors aim to identify:

• The structure of the field, the most consolidated research and its temporal and geographical evolution
• The most recurring theoretical underpinning and constructs
• The most cited articles representing milestones of the literature
• The most impactful authors and journals
• The disciplines and subject areas involved by the topic
• Research implications
• Future research directions

The structure of the paper is as follows. In the first section, the methodology adopted for the literature review and the steps taken in developing the research are presented. In the second section, the results of three different analyses are explained: namely, the paper citation network consisting in the connected components and the main path, the keywords analysis, and finally the global analysis with the basic statistics. In the third and final section, the main conclusions are drawn and questions to be addressed by future research are provided.

The paper is based on a two-step method, referred to as “Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA)” (Colicchia & Strozzi, 2012 ): a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a further analysis of the subset of relevant articles obtained through a bibliographic Network Analysis (NA): namely, the citation network analysis, the co-occurrence networks analysis and the basic statistics. The first qualitative assessment is mainly based on the researchers’ judgements as to the selection of keywords and leverages on an explanatory approach; while the bibliometric assessment provides more objective insights through quantitative and statistical evidence (Aliyev et al., 2018). In particular, bibliographic data analysed through bibliometric methods include the most impactful author names, journal titles, article titles, article keywords and article publication years (Block & Fisch, 2020). The aim is to “complement the traditional content-based literature reviews by extracting quantitative information from bibliographic networks and detect emerging topics, thus revealing the dynamic evolution of the scientific production of a discipline” (Strozzi et al., 2017 ). This dynamic analysis has proven to be effective in different research fields, as it highlights the literature development, identifies authors network and topic clusters, examines gaps and criticalities as well as presents further research directions. In contrast to narrative literature reviews, which aim to summarize the content of the studies of a particular research field, SLNA focuses on assessing the conceptual structure of the field and its development over time (e.g. how has the number of studies evolved, how have the topics evolved, how have the outlets evolved, etc.). It goes beyond a mere descriptive summary of prior literature, by leading a discussion of what we know and where we can go, and allows the measurement of the knowledge diffusion within and between disciplines, by identifying interdisciplinary links. Moreover, compared to traditional methods which lack a clear methodological approach, quantitative bibliographic studies make it possible to avoid the researchers’ selection bias by selecting clear keywords and exclusion / inclusion criteria and by adopting clear boundaries at every stage to ensure a systematic search of papers (Fetscherin & Heinrich, 2015; Block & Fisch, 2020), to the point that the process can be replicated at any time. Lastly, SLNA is characterized by a more up-to-date and broader scope (with regards, for instance, to the journals and publication years considered), thus minimizing the risk of producing an over-reflective and biased argument by the authors but rather leading to evidence-based conclusions.

Figure  1 clarifies all the steps of the methodology.

Systematic Literature Network Analysis (SLNA)

The reference database chosen for the development of the research was Scopus, due to its coverage, convenience, and in alignment with the current literature. According to Falagas et al. ( 2017 ) as well as to Block and Fisch (2020), Scopus includes a more expanded spectrum of journals and a faster and broader citation analysis compared to other research databases, such as Web of Science (WoS). This result has been confirmed by Chadegani et al. ( 2013 ), who assessed that Scopus covers a superior number of journals compared to WoS, even though it is limited to more recent articles, and by Bergman ( 2012 ), who demonstrated that Scopus also provides higher citation counts than Google Scholar and WoS. Moreover, compared to these two other databases, Adriaanse and Rensleigh ( 2013 ) proved that Scopus delivers the least inconsistencies regarding content verification and quality, such as author spelling and sequence, volume and issue number.

The key search criteria and final query were defined on the basis of the keywords used by scholars to address the concept of servant leadership, according to one reference paper among the main pillars of the literature: “Servant leadership: a systematic review and call for future research” (Eva et al., 2019 ) from which this paper mainly differs due to its quantitative citation-based methodology. The most common keywords in literature, also employed in this study, consist of: servant leadership, servant leader, service leadership, servant behaviour and servant organization . In order to develop a more comprehensive definition and consequently to obtain a more comprehensive sample on the topic, the search criteria were loosened to “servant leader*” OR “service leader*” to include both “servant leadership” and “servant leader(s)” OR “service leadership” and “service leader(s)”. Also, considering the different spelling between British English and American English, both terms “behaviour” and “behaviour” were included. As the literature on leadership is very broad, the terms above were limited to three streams of search in the section “Article title” to include only articles that were strictly related and focused on the topic, and not dealing with it in a marginal way, but also to obtain a moderate number of papers to conduct the analysis. This systematic literature review is most suitable when the number of papers is not too limited nor too big. The authors tried to conduct a broader search stream also including keywords and abstracts, but it resulted not applicable: it provided several thousand results and the content of papers obtained was in most cases out of scope. Since the focus of the research was servant leadership from a human resource and organizational perspective, areas were investigated individually to assess whether they were pertinent or not with the topic. On the basis of this analysis, it was possible to include: Business, Social sciences, Economics, Econometrics and Finance, Psychology, Arts and Humanities, Decision sciences, Environmental science and Multidisciplinary. Papers written in languages other than English were excluded. With regards to the time span, the year in which the study was conducted (2020) was eliminated in order to consider only papers of concluded years. Finally, the search was limited to articles and conference papers, as they contain very clear citations and make it possible to achieve ideal results. See Table ​ Table1 1 for the final specification of the query.

Query final specification

This procedure allowed us to obtain a subset of 357 papers published between 1984 and 2019, which were then analysed using VOSViewer (Van Eck et al., 2010 ; Waltman et al., 2010 ) and Pajek software (de Nooy et al., 2011) to identify the main citation path emerging from the citation network and also key concepts and trends emerging from the co-occurrence network. Afterwards, the basic statistics of the whole subset of papers were examined in order to provide some general insights: the temporal and geographical evolution of the literature, the subject areas involved, the ranking of the 10 most cited papers and the most influential authors and journals. The findings of these analyses are reported in the following sections.

Citation Network Analysis

The initial procedure of the network analysis was aimed at identifying the main article clusters emerging from the citation network by using the VOS Clustering analysis (Van Eck et al., 2010 ; Waltman et al., 2010 ). “A citation network is a network where the nodes are papers and the links are citations. The arrows go from cited to citing papers representing the flow of knowledge.” (Strozzi et al., 2017 ). For the identification of the connected component, the minimum threshold of 0 was maintained in order not to exclude recent papers and less relevant authors. The largest connected component (a set of nodes connected by links) consisted of 291 items connected to each other, with 85 different clusters. No other significant connected components emerged from the literature. Figure  2 presents the network obtained with VOSviewer, where nodes are weighted by the citations and coloured with both a cluster and year overlay.

Citation network analysis (size = citation, color = cluster)

The following procedure of the network analysis consisted in implementing the key route algorithm (main path) of the network, using Pajek: a program providing powerful visualization tools. The objective was to identify the nodes that cite or have been cited the most, thus representing the most consolidated research in the field. This was possible by conducting the betweenness centrality analysis of a vertex, which is “the proportion of all geodesics between pairs of other vertices that include this vertex” (de Nooy et al., 2011, p. 131). The betweenness centrality analysis allows to focus on the importance of a node in the communication between any node pair in the network, to identify those playing a central role in information flows and being responsible for the system vulnerability (i.e. vertexes lying on many of the shortest paths between other vertexes). Figure  3 shows the flow of knowledge over time, with the network of the 25 essential articles, intensively cited and referring to other papers, labelled by Pajek with the name of the first author and the year of publication. It is clear how the research structure has changed over time: from 1996 to 2012 it developed linearly, while from 2012 on it has started to articulate towards different directions often interconnected to each other. One possible interpretation of this pattern is the following: originally, the novelty of the subject led to a straight evolution of the field over time, afterwards, once the topic gained ground and different research trends emerged, referencing papers and literature reviews started to come out.

Main path of articles from citation network

Based on the previous analysis, the most relevant papers were studied not only to identify the key concepts expressed by the single paper but most importantly to understand the evolution of the field over time. The analysis of the main path allowed for pinpointing trends and variations that would not be very visible in the general set of papers. The main findings, which are the result of a quantitative analysis and have not been selected by the authors according to a discretionary criterion, are reported in the following section with the aim of depicting a landscape of the scientific literature on the concept of servant leadership.

Main Path Analysis

The most recent paper dealing with servant leadership is the one by Yang et al. ( 2019 ), which builds on self-determination theory to investigate, through an empirical study conducted in the Chinese banking sector, how servant leadership affects employee creativity. The authors used a survey based on five-point Likert scales to assess that there is a positive relationship between servant leadership and employee creativity, mediated by follower psychological empowerment and moderated by work-family conflict. This paper can be considered as a pillar of the literature as it gathers the contributions of several articles, including a paper by the same author written two years before. Yang et al. ( 2017 ) previously provided evidence on other mechanisms influencing the relationship between servant leadership and creativity both at the individual and team level: employees’ efficacy beliefs, as a mediator, and team power distance, as a moderator. With regards to work-family balance, a similar study conducted by Tang et al. ( 2016 ) demonstrated that servant leadership is negatively related to employees’ work-to-family conflict (WFC) and positively related to work-to-family positive spillovers (WFPS), with the moderator role of reduced emotional exhaustion in both relationships and the mediator role of enhanced personal learning in the relationship between servant leadership and WFPS. Hoch et al. ( 2018 ) compared servant leadership and other moral-based forms of leadership (authentic leadership and ethical leadership) with transformational leadership, to assess whether they were able to explain incremental variance with respect to a series of relevant organizational outcomes. Servant leadership emerged as the only positive leadership style adding incremental variance to that explained by transformational leadership, thus being of significant utility. Previously, Van Dierendonck et al. ( 2014 ) leveraged on two experimental studies and one field study to differentiate servant leadership from transformational leadership in the way they affect organizational commitment and work engagement, as the former is mediated by follower need satisfaction while the latter by perceived leadership effectiveness. Hsiao et al. ( 2015 ) systematically integrated the three levels of organization, employee and customer to demonstrate that leaders displaying servant behaviours stimulate customer value co-creation (CVC) with the key mediating roles of positive psychological capital (PPC) and service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Newman et al. ( 2017 ) found that at the basis of the link between servant leadership and followers’ OCBs, there are also the mediating mechanism of leader-member exchange (LMX) and the moderating mechanism of leader proactive personality. Chiniara and Bentein ( 2016 ) previously provided other mediating mechanisms between servant leadership and individual performance outcomes such as OCBs and task performance: namely the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs of employees (autonomy, competence and relatedness). Ozyilmaz and Cicek ( 2015 ) tested the positive effects of servant leadership on OCBs and on job satisfaction, assessing that this second relationship is partially mediated by psychological climate. Hunter et al. ( 2013 ) further investigated both the direct effects generated by servant leaders at the individual level, such as decreased turnover intentions and disengagement, and the indirect effects generated at the team level, such as decreased turnover intentions, helping and sales behaviour through the mediation of service climate. Moreover, they investigated the basis for individuals enacting this mode of leadership and found that leader agreeableness represents a positive antecedent of servant leadership, while extraversion a negative one. Executive characteristics of servant leaders were also tested by Peterson et al. ( 2012 ) , who assessed that narcissism is negatively related to servant leadership while founder status (i.e. founder or non-founder) is positively related to servant leadership; both effects are partially mediated by the chief executive officer identification in the organization. Sun ( 2013 ) further concentrated on the identity of servant leaders, by explaining the psychological factors, both cognitive and behavioural, that constitute it. Neubert et al. ( 2016 ) tested servant leadership effects in hospitals, accumulating evidence that there is a positive relationship with both nurse and patient satisfaction, moderated by organizational structure. Similarly, Chen et al. ( 2015 ) explored how managers’ servant leadership affect the performance of frontline service employees’, such as hairdressers, through the partial mediation of self-efficacy and group identification. In relation to these performance behaviours, they also found that servant leadership explains additional variance above and beyond transformational leadership. Liden et al. ( 2014 ) developed a model to test servant leadership in restaurants and stores. Specifically, they demonstrated that servant leaders propagate servant leadership behaviours among employees, such as increased job performance, creativity and customer service behaviours as well as decreased turnover intentions, by establishing a serving culture at the unit level (e.g. store) and fostering employee identification with the unit. Liden et al. ( 2015 ) contributed to the literature by providing the shortest-to-date 7-item scale (SL-7) measure of global servant leadership, starting from a previous 28-item scale (SL-28) developed in 2008, and tested it across three empirical independent studies. Besides the topic of employee creativity already investigated in literature, Yoshida et al. ( 2014 ) ascertained the effects of servant leadership on individual relational identification and collective prototypicality, which, in turn, fosters team innovation. Antecedents of servant leadership discussed above have been examined by other scholars, such as Hu and Liden ( 2011 ), who identified team-level goal, process clarity and team servant leadership as three mechanisms affecting team potency, performance and organizational citizenship behaviour. The authors also emphasized the role of servant leaders in moderating the link between team-level goal and process clarity with team potency. Similar outcomes were found a year before by Walumbwa et al. ( 2010 ), whose analyses revealed that the relationship between servant leadership and OCBs is partially mediated by commitment to the supervisor, self-efficacy, procedural justice climate and service climate. Hale and Fields ( 2007 ) leveraged on three servant leadership dimensions introduced by Greenleaf (1977), namely service, humility and vision, to point out cultural differences affecting the way servant leadership is perceived in different countries. Specifically, they found that countries with a higher level of power distance and collectivism experience servant leadership behaviours less frequently. They also assessed that, when great value is placed on uncertainty avoidance, vision has a significant stronger relationship with leadership effectiveness. Previously, Dennis and Bocarnea ( 2005 ) developed and tested a scale aimed at measuring five out of the seven servant leadership constructs based on Patterson’s theory: agapao love (which means to love in a social or moral way), humanity, vision, trust and empowerment. This theoretical development was drawn on a literature review by Russell ( 2001 ), who provided an overview of the current individual and organizational values associated with servant leadership, deepening their role in three main attributes: trust, appreciation of others and empowerment. A sequential, upward-spiralling model based on the variables of vision, influence, credibility, trust and service was formerly developed by Farling et al. ( 1999 ) to explain how these variables relate one to another in defining the concept at the basis of servant leadership. This paper represented an evolution of two former analyses. The first one consists in a servant leadership model developed by Buchen ( 1998 ) within the context of higher education and based on five main dimensions: identity (the direction of ego and image), empowering (the sharing of power with collaborators), reciprocity (a relationship of mutual dependency between leaders and followers), commitment (the absolute devotion to academic discipline) and finally future (the alignment between faculty and institution). The second is a reflection paper on Greenleaf’s definition of servant leadership by Spears ( 1996 ), which, on the one hand, emphasizes the primary goal of serving the greater needs of others and, on the other hand, draws the evolution of the topic from its genesis (1970) to the current time (2019).

At first, from the mid 1990’s to the late 2000’s, research was mainly qualitative and moved towards the development of a theoretical framework of servant leadership, as well as of various scales aimed at measuring the main dimensions of the construct. The last stream of research from 2010 to 2020, instead, suggests the authors’ orientation for a quantitative approach based on surveys, experimental and field studies to investigate the antecedents, mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions of servant leadership. Recently, some qualitative studies have emerged again on the topic; however, very few scholars are taking advantage of mixed methods combining the quantitative and qualitative approach.

From a theoretical perspective, the attempt of the present paper was also that of identifying meaningful constructs, underpinnings and framework used in the most consolidated literature on servant leadership, even if not explicitly mentioned by single studies. All papers, except one, were built on the basis of the servant leadership theory, often in combination with theories on other leadership styles, such as transformational, or on antecedents, outcomes, mediators and moderators of servant leadership, such as LMX theory. Moreover, the majority of paper explicitly employed more than one theoretical basis. The most recurring theory (6 out of 25 papers) was the social exchange theory, which was defined by Blau (1964) as “voluntary actions of individuals that are motivated by the returns they are expected to bring and typically do in fact bring from others” (p. 91) and is based on the central premise that the exchange of social and material resources is a fundamental form of human interaction. Motivational theories were also found several times (6 papers), with different sub-theories, such as goal-setting theory, motivational language theory and intrinsic motivation theory, emphasizing various factors that can foster personal or followers’ motivation. The most important among these motivational theories came out to be the self-determination theory’s (SDT) basic psychological needs, which consists in an empirically-based theory of human behavior and personality development aimed at identifying the social-contextual aspects that promote or prevent motivation based on the satisfaction of basic psychological needs such as competence, relatedness and autonomy (Ryan & Deci, 2017, pag. 3). The social learning theory (SLT), then evolved in the social cognitive theory (SCT), also emerged to be fundamental (5 papers), positing that learning occurs within a social context through the combination of individual experience, social interaction and environmental factors. Finally, the least recurring theory was the social identity theory (2 papers), which is a social psychological theory examining the role of self and identity in group and intergroup dynamics (Hogg, 2016).

Co-word Network Analysis (Keywords Analysis: VOS Clustering)

A second type of analysis, focused on the authors’ keywords, was carried out in VOSviewer on the basis of the co-occurrence network. Co-occurrence analysis assumes that the article keywords chosen by various authors represent an adequate description of the content or of the relationship that the paper establishes between investigated problems (Strozzi et al., 2017 ). The aim of the analysis was to frame the development of the research trends over time: if many co-occurrences can be identified around a term, this is likely to represent a specific research pattern of the discipline. An occurrence threshold of 8 was used, with the goal of ensuring clusters’ consistency in terms of content and dimension. A set of the 17 most relevant keywords divided into 3 different clusters was obtained, as shown in Fig.  4 .

Co-occurrence author keywords network (size = total link strength, color = cluster)

The network’s nodes correspond to the keywords of the 357 papers’ authors and their link weights to how many times the words appear in the papers. Three colors (red, blue and green) differentiate the keywords belonging to one cluster from other clusters’ keywords, while the dimension of the node stands for the total link strength.

In the following section, the keywords clusters are examined in order to address the most relevant research patterns in the literature. Hence, the topics below have been discussed on the basis of the output of a quantitative analysis, aimed at addressing the most used keywords in the literature and identifying research trajectories within each cluster.

Cluster 1: Servant Leadership, Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Leadership Development, Scale Development, Trust

Servant leadership is one of the most recently investigated and adopted approaches belonging to the branch of moral leadership theories. As such, it has been studied in parallel with other similar leadership styles, such as transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is a positive form of leadership developed by Burns in 1978 as an ongoing process where “leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation beyond self-interest to serve collective interests”. This concept was then expanded by Bass ( 1985 ) and applied to organizations as a guideline for leaders to make followers perform beyond expectations. From a theoretical standpoint, a significant overlap between servant leadership and transformational leadership has been assessed by scholars, especially in terms of vision, influence, credibility, trust and service shown by leaders, to the point that servant leadership has often been considered as a form of transformational leadership (Farling et al., 1999 ). Trust, in particular, has been addressed in both leadership styles as central to relationship: an important factor in the interdependence existing between leaders and followers, consisting in four distinct dimensions: competence, openness, concern and reliability. Nevertheless, an attempt has been made to define the major variables involved in the servant-leader follower transformational model. On the other hand, research has tried to identify and address the main differences, or better nuances, between the two leadership approaches: while servant leadership focuses more on supporting and developing individuals within an institution, transformational leadership emphasizes the role of leaders in inspiring followers to work towards a common goal (Allen et al., 2016 ).

In 2010s, another stream of literature has focused on the development of a reliable and multidimensional scale to measure various aspects of servant leadership. Examples include the 6-item Servant Leadership Behavior scale (Sendjaya et al., 2019 ) to measure servant leadership behaviors in a leader, or the Executive Servant Leadership Scale (Reed et al., 2011 ) to measure executive servant leadership across different organizational contexts.

Cluster 2: Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, Public Sector, China

Several empirical studies have analyzed the relationship between servant leadership and different organizational outcomes, both at the individual and collective level, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Moreover, different mediating and moderating mechanisms as well as various antecedents of this type of relationship have been investigated. For instance, Kauppila et al. ( 2018 ) demonstrated that HR manager servant leadership positively influences organizational employees’ overall justice perception, which in turn enhances organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Moreover, they found that high leadership self-efficacy fosters a line manager’s effectiveness to emulate servant leadership behaviors from HR managers and use these behaviors to advance positive justice perceptions among their followers.

Since the general concept of leadership and the specific concept of servant leadership were developed in the US and in western societies, a consistent research stream has examined the generalizability of servant leadership constructs in completely different cultural contexts, such as China. US society is indeed highly individualistic, short-term oriented and characterized by low-power distance, meaning that relationships are expected to be participatory, democratic and consultative, while Chinese society is permeated by a collectivist culture, long-term goals and high-power distance, therefore based on the expectation that power is distributed unequally. Also, most of these studies were conducted in the public sector, where servant leadership has proven to be very effective in fostering many positive organizational outcomes. Liu et al. ( 2015 ) partially confirmed the generalizability of servant leadership constructs from Western society to China and also found a positive relationship between supervisors’ servant leadership and the public service motivation.

Cluster 3: Organizational Culture, Humans, Human, Adult, Male, Female, Article

Organizations across different fields and geographical contexts need to understand the role of a leadership that is responsive to a “service mission” in driving the company’s evolution and success. Effective servant leadership practices are “humane oriented”; they are implemented when managers or leaders invest in human resources to create a social exchange relationship with employees that makes them feel valued and repay the organization through positive outcomes (Karatepe et al., 2019 ). As a consequence, employees’ commitment and creativity are stimulated and organizational citizenship and prosocial behaviors are fostered, leading to an increase in organizational performance. For instance, Zhou and Miao ( 2014 ) found that servant leadership positively influences employees’ commitment through perceived organizational support as a mediator.

In this framework, culture, and particularly organizational culture, is strictly connected to the leadership style adopted within a company. On the one hand, servant leadership is more likely to apply in contexts characterized by specific cultural values such as paternalism, collectivism and low-power distance. On the other hand, servant leadership can be adopted to create a new organizational culture based on trust, fairness and high-quality leader–follower relationships (Lee et al., 2019 ).

Leadership attitudes also vary according to gender, as some studies reported that, relative to their counterparts, leading females are more likely to display behaviors of altruistic calling, emotional healing and organizational stewardship (Beck, 2014) and to hold service and altruistic value (De Rubio & Kiser, 2015); therefore, they more often behave as servant leaders.

Keywords Temporal Analysis

From a temporal standpoint, VOSviewer offers a graphic representation that allows us to identify the most recent keywords and therefore the core topics currently discussed in literature.

Figure  5 , overlay visualization, displays the ultimate research trends by coloring them in yellow, in contrast with the oldest, colored in blue. It is possible to infer that the concept of servant leadership has been recently discussed in relation to some important outcomes, such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction, to which it is linked by evidence. The effectiveness of this leadership style represented in several organizational contexts has encouraged the development of specific leadership practices, such as training or interventions, aimed at fostering the servant leadership behaviors. At present, most empirical studies have focused on the public sector, as it is often characterized by front-line employees who imitate servant leaders’ behaviors displayed by their managers, thus promoting the quality of relationships with end-customers and providing significant benefits to the whole organization. In this framework, the influence of organizational culture is still relevant, as it determines the way servant leadership is built by leaders and perceived by followers, along with its effectiveness in achieving the desired outcomes. In fact, according to the cultural climate, servant leadership may relate to both individual and organizational outcomes through different mediating and moderating mechanisms.

Overlay visualization

Global Analysis: Basic Statistics

In the “analyze search results” section of Scopus, it is possible to gain some general insights into the whole subset of 357 papers used for the purpose of this literature review.

Figure  6 shows how the topic of servant leadership dates back to the mid 1980s but started receiving significant attention only with the beginning of the new millennium. Particularly, it experienced exponential growth from 2007 to 2019. This corresponds to the period when the first scales for the measurement of servant leadership were developed allowing the conduction of several empirical studies across various organizational contexts.

Documents by year

From a geographical standpoint, it is possible to observe in Fig.  7 how the trend has interested primarily the United States (40.8%), where theories of servant leadership first originated, and China in the second place (13.8%), where the western construct of servant leadership was tested to assess its reliability and validity across cultures. Several cultural differences have indeed been assessed between the United States and the Chinese culture; for instance, China is a long-term and collectivist country committed to work loyalty and respect, while the United States are more individualistic and oriented to short-term business relationships. The topic has then spread in most Anglo-Saxon countries, such as Australia (7.7%), United Kingdom (7.4%), South Africa (5.8%) and Canada (4.5%), probably fostered by their use of a common language and their cultural and historical ties. The countries of Netherlands, Hong Kong, Spain and Turkey represent altogether the remaining 19.9%.

Documents by country or territory

Servant leadership is a versatile and multidisciplinary topic, as it can be applied to a variety of contexts that also fall outside that of the typical corporation. Figure  8 shows how, besides Business, Management and Accounting (38.7%), the subject areas of Social Sciences (25.3%) Psychology (11.1%) and Arts and Humanities (7.9%) are also significantly involved in the literature. This can be explained by the fact that, rather than organizations, at the core of servant leadership are humans: specifically, leaders and their followers.

Documents by subject area

Figure  9 shows the contribution of the most impactful journals over time. The Leadership and Organization Development Journal with 22 articles out of 63, is the leading in the field and has grown exponentially from 2015. The journal of Business Ethics, with its 15 articles, has also been very influential for contributions to servant leadership research in the last decade. Other articles focusing on servant leadership have been published in Leadership Quarterly (10), International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (8), and Leadership Organization Development Journal (8), which are also the longest-running in time.

Documents per year by source

With regards to the scholars who significantly contributed to the academic research on servant leadership (Fig.  10 ), some are based in the United States, where leadership theories have originated and are still widely investigated; the remaining part are based in Europe and Australia but have worked for important American journals and communities, such as Greenleaf center for servant leadership. The most important contribution comes from van Dierendonck (2014, 2019), who has an expertise in leadership and leadership development at Erasmus University (Rotterdam, Holland) and is the associate editor of the International Journal of Servant Leadership, published by Gonzaga University (Washington, United States) in collaboration with the Spears Center for Servant-Leadership. Two other influential authors are Liden et al. ( 2008 , 2014 , 2015 ) and Sendjaya et al. ( 2008 , 2019 ), who have been writing for some of the most important journals in the field, such as Leadership quarterly, Journal of business ethics and Leadership and organizational development journal, which were also highlighted by the previous analysis (Fig.  9 ). The remaining scholars, Winston and Fields ( 2015 ), Eva (2019), Ruiz-Palomino (2018), Bande (2015), Barbuto and Wheeler ( 2006 ), Cooper (2014) and Jaramillo (2009, 2015), have to be mentioned as they also provided considerable contribution to research, as proved by the number of citations of their works.

Documents by author

Figure  11 shows the output of an analysis performed in order to identify recent breakthrough papers that have provided a significant contribution to the topic and have received considerable attention from the scientific community. The ten most cited papers have been identified by extracting all 357 papers from the Scopus database and ranking them according to the overall number of citations of the last 5 years, divided by 5 (average value of citation per year). This reduced time span has been chosen instead of the time-length of the whole dataset in order to avoid the biased result of obtaining the oldest papers as the most cited, due to the fact that they would have received a greater number of citations over time. The article with the highest number of citations is the one by Liden et al. ( 2008 ) who developed and validated a multidimensional measure of 28 items measuring 9 essential dimensions of servant leadership. This scale has been widely applied to test the construct validity in various organizational contexts in recent time, together with its shortened version of 7 item developed by Wayne et al. in 2015. The remaining most cited articles can be divided in three groups, according to the research streams. One stream has focused on the clarification of the construct and the servant leadership theories in organizations, including scale development and validation. A second stream has been investigating the mediating and moderating mechanisms through which servant leadership leads to a series of behavioral, attitudinal and performance outcomes, both at the individual and collective level. Finally, a third stream has compared servant leadership to other moral-based leadership styles, such as transformational, ethical and authentic leaderships in terms of focus and their associations with a wide range of organizationally relevant measures. All the most cited papers are part of the biggest component shown in Fig.  2 ; moreover, four out of the ten papers are included in the main path, while the remaining six are not. Being written by more than one authors, these impactful papers are the result of a significant investigation conducted on the topic by more scholars. Altogether, the articles suggest that the most consistent trend in literature is moving towards the measurement of servant leadership across various cultural and organizational contexts, at both the individual and collective levels (organization, employee, customer, etc.). This has been possible through the clarification of the common constructs composing servant leadership and the development of a scale able to test them across different organizations and organizational levels.

Ranking of the ten most cited papers in the last 5 years (mean value of citation per year)

This paper represents an attempt to rationalize the content of research developed in the context of servant leadership. The limitations of the study are mainly related to the adopted methodology. First of all, it consists in a literature review based on a citation network analysis, which may not be fully representative of a paper’s qualitative contribution to the body of knowledge, especially because VOSviewer shows only a part of the whole subset. Moreover, citations could be biased because scholars often tend to cite the most relevant articles in the literature, driven by their reputation and popularity. However, these limitations can be overcome due to the fact that the purpose of the current study is to depict an evolutionary path of the topic, rather than investigate in-depth the contribution of single papers.

The growing body of empirical studies on servant leadership, analyzed for the purpose of the analysis, has allowed to identify some consolidated streams of research and some areas of the literature deserving further investigation. First of all, there is evidence that servant leadership can foster employees’ positive outcomes, with different antecedents and through various mediating and moderating mechanisms. These outcomes have been found at the individual, team and organizational level and are of various types: behavioral, such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and proactive behavior (Chiniara & Bentein, 2016 ; Newman et al., 2017 ; Ozyilmaz & Cicek, 2015 ; Walumbwa et al., 2010 ) attitudinal, such as engagement and job satisfaction (Chiniara & Bentein, 2016 ; Hunter et al., 2013 ; Kauppila et al., 2018 ; Van Dierendonck et al., 2014 ) and performance, such as customer value co-creation and team performance (Hsiao et al., 2015 ; Hu & Liden, 2011 ). Moreover, servant leadership has been found to be of significant utility in explaining incremental variance above and beyond transformational, ethical and authentic leadership, with regards to these organizationally relevant criterion measures (Hoch et al., 2018 ). For this reason, scholars have addressed their attention to this leadership approach and several companies are moving towards the adoption of an organizational climate based on service, ethics and healthy work relationships that could significantly contribute to the organizational success (Eva et al., 2019 ). This aspect makes servant leadership attractive for both future research and usage. Also, in the analyses of the present study (main path, keywords clusters, global statistics), no significant criticism of servant leadership, from both an empirical and theoretical level, has emerged; the development of minor critical examinations has always started from a prior enhancement of the construct and its positive outcomes. It has to be considered, however, that the unquestioned positive praise of servant leadership may be due to the so called “Matthew effect”: the fact that those papers offering a promising perspective of servant leadership, which have previously been successful, are more likely to be cited again and again (Bol et al., 2018 ).

Although a positive interpretation of servant leadership prevails in the literature, the authors of the present study went beyond the outputs of the main analyses to identify in the literature some potential drawbacks associated with the adoption of this practice within organizations (Palumbo, 2015 ). First of all, it has to be considered that the servant leadership approach takes time to build, as it requires strong interpersonal relationships engaging the emotional, relational and ethical dimension of followers, in which both the leader and the followers play a vital role in maintaining them over time. Plus, the servant leadership style may not be suitable for all organizations, especially those characterized by a fast-changing environment where decisions have to be made quickly, due to the fact that they would require a fast top-down approach, rather than bottom-up. Another risk is losing sight of the purpose of the organization and ultimate goals in favour of people development: the servant leader is in fact devoted to the individual employee and their growth rather than to the organization. This could have negative effects on the organizational effectiveness. On the other hand, a successful company performance is not always due to a visionary leader who establishes a climate of service, as this represents a common misperception of the business world: the halo effect (i.e. the tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression).

Lastly, too much healing and empathy shown by the leader may turn into merely protective behaviour towards followers, which would discourage them from adopting a proactive role and promptly dealing with critical issues within the organization. This would challenge the prevailing arguments of the literature of servant leadership by producing a disabling environment that disempowers employees and leads to a situation of dependency on the leader (Palumbo, 2015 ). To prevent this possible counterintuitive consequence, servant leaders should act as role models and lead by example, ensuring at the same time that followers have the right degree of autonomy and responsibility. In light of these considerations, the conceptualization of servant leadership should be revisited to contemplate its side-effects, in terms of followers’ behaviour, leader–follower relationships and organizational outcomes, to prevent the impoverishment of the overall organizational effectiveness predicted by some studies (Andersen, 2009 ; Palumbo, 2015 ; Liu, 2019 ; Chenwei et al., 2021 , Wu et al., 2021 ).

In particular, the authors of the present study have leveraged on a critical assessment of the outputs of the main analyses of the literature on servant leadership to identify some research areas that have not been examined in detail and deserve further investigation:

• servant leaders’ system of beliefs and values (i.e. ethics) as well as other antecedents, that may significantly affect followers’ and organizational performance;
• other mediating or moderating mechanisms (i.e. contextual discriminants) influencing the relationship between servant leadership and positive outcomes, both at the individual and organizational level;
• servant leadership behaviours displayed by followers, that are useful to promote customers’ satisfaction, especially in the service sector;
• the utility of servant leadership in contexts where it has not yet been evaluated, such as technology, to test its validity across industries;
• longitudinal, multi-level studies confirming the effectiveness and generalizability of the most recent scale of global servant leadership assessment (SL-7) across culturally diverse countries (other than the US and China, as suggested by this literature review), according to well-known frameworks such as Hofstede’s
• critical theoretical and empirical investigation of the potential shortcomings of servant leadership often neglected by scholars, to challenge the current positive interpretation of the topic and advance the scientific knowledge

Additionally, on the basis of the authors’ considerations, the role of servant leadership, compared to other types of leadership, may be investigated within the institutional framework (e.g. public services and administration, where it has shown to be very effective) and companies’ organizational change management.

Conclusions and Managerial Implications

Due to its holistic approach, broad focus and important role in affecting both individual and team-level outcomes, servant leadership has seen a proliferation of studies in the last 20 years. In response to this research trend, the aim of this paper was threefold. First of all, the recent evolution of the field was depicted through the identification of the main articles cluster that has been cited the most, thus representing the consolidated literature. Second, the development of the research trends over time was framed on the basis of the co-occurrence of authors’ keywords. Third, by conducting analyses on the main subset of papers, the authors presented some general insights on the topic, such as its temporal and geographical development, the main contexts where it has been studied and applied, the most cited papers providing a significant contribution to the field and the most influential journals and authors. The results of the analyses conducted in the present study indicate that the interpretation of servant leadership prevailing in literature is positive, due to the promising attitudinal, behavioural and performance outcomes that it can produce on followers.

Nevertheless, scholars should examine the potential drawbacks of servant leadership, assess its validity across industries, as well as identify the best scenario where it can be implemented. From a practical standpoint, managers should consider the importance of promoting servant leadership in employment settings, to develop specific skills and ultimately improve an organizational climate of empowerment. The servant leadership approach may be particularly effective in the post covid-19 scenario and / or in contexts characterized by a high degree of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). In these environments, leaders struggle to make all decisions, thus requiring the proactiveness and motivational orientation of all employees, which have been identified as important mediators to positive followers’ outcomes in the servant leadership research (Eva et al., 2019 ). Specifically, further considerations are needed in relation to the potential role of this leadership practice in empowering and supporting followers, as well as in giving them the right degree of autonomy and responsibility to take on new challenges and act on behalf of the company when pressured by the external environment.

Data Availability

Code availability, declarations.

We have no conflict of interest or competing interest to disclose.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Alice Canavesi, Email: ti.cuil@isevanaca .

Eliana Minelli, Email: ti.cuil@illenime .

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Servant leadership behavior at workplace and knowledge hoarding: a moderation mediation examination.

• 1 Business School, Henan University, Kaifeng, China
• 2 Department of Business Administration, ILMA University, Karachi, Pakistan
• 3 Department of Business Administration, Iqra National University, Peshawar, Pakistan
• 4 Institute of Business and Management Sciences, The University of Agriculture, Peshawar, Pakistan
• 5 Public Policy Observatory, Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Santiago, Chile
• 6 Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad Andres Bello, Santiago, Chile

Servant leadership practice honesty, stewardship, and high moral standards while prioritizing the needs of subordinates. The moral concern of a servant leadership is to support others and put the needs of others first. We investigated the relationship between servant leadership, psychological safety, and knowledge hoarding in accordance with social learning theory in a survey of 347 workers across 56 teams. The results of this study illustrate that servant leadership is negatively associated with knowledge hoarding and positively associated with psychological safety. We also found that a mastery climate moderated the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. This study highlights the theoretical and practical implications that contribute to the body of knowledge. It helps organizations that the presence of servant leadership may discourage knowledge hoarding by providing a psychologically safe mastery climate.

Introduction

Employees who hide, hoard, or simply refuse to share knowledge with others in their organization are becoming a rising issue in today’s workplace. It is disruptive and has a significant impact on the lack of productivity in the workplace ( Flynn et al., 2022 ). It seems that employees who purposefully hoard knowledge will be met by similar selfish conduct on the part of their coworkers, which will eventually harm them and reduce their ability to be creative ( Wu J. et al., 2021 ). Organizations are developing new working methods. Our typical business problems are layered with additional challenges: new ways of functioning, keeping employee’s safe and addressing layoffs, furloughs, and loss of revenue ( Newman and Newman, 2021 ). Negative consequences on the global economy have adverse social implications (i.e., good health and well-being, poverty, quality education, etc.). We need servant leadership that helps employees emotionally and cognitively to survive and face all those challenges efficiently ( Obi et al., 2020 ). Servant leader’s primary moral objective and obligation are to serve their employees ( Lumpkin and Achen, 2018 ). They put the needs of their subordinates first, rather than their own self-interests ( Hunter et al., 2013 ). Leaders who practice servant leadership make certain their subordinates in developing their career professionally and even in terms of their physical well-being ( Latif and Marimon, 2019 ). Leaders who transfer their services to their workers are more likely to develop talented, knowledgeable, and motivated individuals who, in turn enhance the overall operations and management of the organization ( Abdulmuhsin et al., 2021 ). Scholars have studied servant leadership and its positive effect on employees and organizations extensively in the past ( Saleem et al., 2020 ). Servant leadership was positively related to employees work engagement, workplace spirituality, work motivation, individual and team performance, and organization effectiveness ( Baloch et al., 2021 ). Servant leadership also plays a crucial role in reducing employee’s turnover, CWB, employee cynicism, and job stress ( Erkutlu and Chafra, 2017 ). Previous studies on servant leadership and knowledge management have been divided ( Hunter et al., 2013 ; He et al., 2021 ). Most studies have examined the relationship between servant leadership and employee knowledge sharing behavior, but there is a dire need of to examine servant leadership with knowledge hoarding behavior. Knowledge hiding and knowledge hoarding are two different concepts, knowledge hiding is intentional act to hide and conceal knowledge when someone request while knowledge hoarding is purposely keeping information and knowledge to themselves.

According to a poll of 1700 newspaper readers conducted by The Globe and Mail, employees are more prone to hoard knowledge from their coworkers than sharing it publicly. A similar study conducted in China, 46% of those polled admitted that they hoarding knowledge at their work place ( Peng, 2013 ). For Fortune 500 businesses, this turn in to a yearly loss of $31.5 billion in revenue Babcock (2004) . Organizations face a huge cost of knowledge hoarding; therefore, leaders must figure out to prevent it from happening in their organizations. When describing unethical conduct in organizations, in such situation servant leadership is one of the good choice ( Wah et al., 2007 ; Lumpkin and Achen, 2018 ). Servant leaders may positively influence their teams’ moral standards by serving as positive role models, enforcing better moral standards via the use of punishments and incentives, and showing concern and care for their workers ( Hunter et al., 2013 ; Sun et al., 2020b ). In general, most employees consider it unethical and detrimental to the interests of the company and its employees to hoard knowledge ( Serenko, 2019 ). Knowledge hoarding may also be deemed improper in an atmosphere characterized by high service levels ( Oliveira et al., 2021 ).

This research was based on Bandura’s social learning theory ( Bandura, 1977 ) and evaluated a connection between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding in the workplace. According to social learning theory, individuals try to follow leader’s behavior and actions in the workplace ( Wu J. et al., 2021 ). Servant leadership communication with their subordinates regarding what is wrong or right through open communication ( Latif and Marimon, 2019 ; He et al., 2020 ). Therefore, social learning theory is helpful to explain the social learning process through which followers adopt the learning approach ( Wu J. et al., 2021 ). This approach helps employees to less hoard their knowledge under servant leadership. Attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control all play a key role in employees’ desire to share their expertise with their co-workers in a servant leadership style. Understanding how servant leadership impacts workers’ knowledge-hoarding behavior is based on findings from social learning theory ( Bandura, 1977 ). It also looks at how servant leadership affects employee knowledge hoarding via psychological mechanisms. It is more probable that employees will have a high level of psychological safety when their supervisors exhibit servant leadership by emphasizing mutual respect which is beyond the interpersonal trust.

Psychological safety—“Psychological safety is a multi-dimensional, dynamic phenomenon that concerns team members’ perception of whether it is safe to take interpersonal risks at work” ( Liang et al., 2012 ; Ali et al., 2021 ). Additionally, by emphasizing psychological safety as a critical motivator for workers to express themselves, share their ideas, and exchange knowledge ( Iqbal et al., 2020 ). Here in this study, we examine the servant leadership role in psychological safety, which we further studied with knowledge hoarding. A necessary boundary condition of the supposed causal chain is also identified, further developing our servant leadership model and knowledge hoarding. In terms of knowing how to prevent knowledge hoarding occurring from the organization’s perspective, creating a mastery climate is essential. Knowledge hoarding is done for three reasons: (1) employees hoard knowledge so that they become irreplaceable. (2) It might be nerve-wracking to put oneself out there. What if your coworkers or superiors have anything terrible to say about you? (3) Employees will be less inclined to divulge their “secrets” if your company favors individual achievements over collective ones. Social learning and psychological well-being are essential ( Sendjaya et al., 2019 ; Saeed et al., 2022a ). A mastery climate, in which workers’ efforts, collaboration, understanding, and self-development are valued, is also assumed by theorists while developing their ideas.

Employees may see knowledge hoarding as a detrimental behavior in a mastery climate since it hinders the reciprocal advantages of knowledge sharing, such as developing skills in their teams ( Bari et al., 2019 ). The research on knowledge hoarding has also emphasized the importance of mastery climate as a critical contextual moderator ( Caniëls et al., 2019 ; He et al., 2019 ). As a result, we propose exploring the moderating function of mastery climate to determine the boundary conditions of the servant leadership–knowledge concealment relationship. Furthermore, our theoretical viewpoint and empirical findings make significant contributions to the literature on organizational behavior and knowledge management, both of which are key areas of study in their respective fields. The relation between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding is limited and has not been studied in the past. Therefore, studying the role of servant leadership with knowledge hoarding is our main of the research, and linking the mechanism between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding is limited. Abdullah et al. (2019) examined the direct link between ethical leadership and knowledge hoarding in the past. Still, this study is novel to explore the servant leadership role and mediation (psychological safety) and moderating role of (i.e., mastery climate). The target population was students in laboratory settings in previous studies, but this study used full-time employees from actual work settings.

Researchers believe that activities carried out in laboratories may fail to elicit the kinds of solid affective reactions needed to uncover the underlying causes of immoral behavior since they are not stimulating enough ( Shin, 2014 ). A further limitation of laboratory testing may be that it cannot accurately recreate the long-term connections and dynamics that occur in real-world work scenarios ( Tsai et al., 2012 ). Thus, in this research, we are interested in determining how and when servant leadership is associated with confidential information in the workplace. First, our data show that servant leadership and information hoarding negatively correlate. Second, a mediation framework is developed based on social learning theory that connects servant leadership to knowledge hoarding via psychological safety. Third, mastery climate was examined as a boundary condition between negative association of servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. Fourth, to affect knowledge hoarding, we evaluate the connection between psychological safety and mastery atmosphere. Additionally, the cross-level design and the two-phase data gathering technique were used in this work, which both contribute to the production of more relevant and dependable results. Our study model is shown in Figure 1 .

Figure 1. Conceptual model.

Theoretical Background and Hypotheses

Servant leadership and knowledge hoarding.

Servant leadership is defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and promoting such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making” ( Reed et al., 2011 ). Andersen (2018) defined that servant leadership consists of two essential attributes. The first one is related to their moral conduct, where servant leaders have trustworthiness, caring, and stewardship qualities. Second the management component, wherein service leaders influence their followers through their actions, encourage helping behavior in the organization, and discourage immoral behavior ( Andersen, 2018 ). Establishing high standards for followers and mentoring them to keep them accountable for acceptable behavior while still treating them equitably ( Latif and Marimon, 2019 ). According to social learning theory, social conduct is learnt through observing and copying the behavior of others in social situations. The technique of mentorship, which is explained by social learning theory, allows servant leaders to intentionally or unintentionally affect the conduct of their subordinates in this manner ( Bandura, 1977 ). Social learning theory helps us to analyze the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. Following social learning theory, people gain knowledge through the actions and behaviors of their mentorship. Through this role-modeling process, individuals learn appropriate behavior and activities that help them act decently. According to Liden et al. (2014) , leaders’ show and serves moral conduct and influence others through punishment and rewards approaches. Such an approach is reliable in followers in inducing moral behavior. They are seen as appealing and credible role models because of their position as servant leaders in organizations. When it comes to employees, servant leaders provide employees significant hints about how they might act in a servant-like manner instead of engaging in unethical practices like knowledge hoarding ( Song et al., 2015 ). Employees that follow a servant leader are more likely to engage in the servant or good behaviors ( Iqbal et al., 2020 ). Because of this, servant leaders may give incentives to their employees for participating in cooperative behaviors such as knowledge sharing while discouraging immoral behaviors such as knowledge hoarding ( Iqbal et al., 2020 ). In sum, it is stated that there is a negative relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding by influencing or adequately helping followers. Through their actions, followers can differentiate between wrong and right in the workplace. To be a servant leader, one must put the interests of others instead of one’s own, demonstrate empathy and care, and work for the betterment of their team members and organization ( Wu J. et al., 2021 ). As they develop connections with their subordinates and provide developmental opportunities, servant leaders may help their organizations successfully implement knowledge management practices ( Abdulmuhsin et al., 2021 ).

Hypothesis 1: There is a negative association between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding.

Servant Leadership and Psychological Safety

Workers’ psychological safety will improve in the presence of servant leadership. Leaders who have servants behavior follow the workplace rules and treat others how they want to be treated ( Erkutlu and Chafra, 2017 ). When leaders practice servant leadership, they exhibit sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and caring for their employees by reminding them that their first duty is the psychological safety of their subordinates ( Andersen, 2018 ). It is believed that servant leaders’ actions may “trickle-down” to their subordinates. According to social learning theory, examines how both environmental and cognitive variables interact to impact human learning and behavior in order to understand how people learn and behave, which in turn may encourage others who observe the generally uniform acts of servant leaders toward their colleagues to follow their example ( Martin et al., 2016 ). When servant leaders engage honestly and openly with their workers, they create a win-win scenario for everyone involved. Mutual respect and inter-personal trust emerge between leaders and their followers due to this connection ( Obi et al., 2020 ). Additionally, the past study has shown that when employees see servant leaders’ interpersonal behaviors like compassion, excitement, devotion, and empathy, they feel more psychologically safe ( Ma et al., 2021 ). Employees’ psychological safety is increased by servant leaders, who create an environment where they feel comfortable expressing their thoughts views and making choices ( Ma et al., 2021 ; Saeed et al., 2022a , b ). According to Edmondson (1999) , people in a condition of psychological safety are characterized by their ability to be engaged, respected, and cherished. They are confident that if they speak out, ask questions, or make mistakes, they will not be embarrassed, sidelined, or penalized in any way. It is a safe space where servant leaders may be open and honest with their followers. In empirical study shows that psychological safety is associated with servant leadership ( Brohi et al., 2021 ; Khan et al., 2022b ), and it shows that it is an essential psychological mechanism in organizations ( Brohi et al., 2021 ).

Hypothesis 2: There is a positive association between servant leadership and psychological safety.

Psychological Safety and Knowledge Hoarding

Knowledge hoarding—“when employees purposely keep critical knowledge to themselves—is a fairly common phenomenon found in companies of all sizes.” It’s an uphill battle to create a culture of knowledge sharing ( Connelly et al., 2012 ). It is common for employees to keep their knowledge hidden from one another, and the level of trust between coworkers influences how each replies when asked for knowledge in the workplace ( Connelly et al., 2012 ). There are two reasons why knowledge hoarding is negatively associated with psychological safety. First, psychological safety is a consequence of mutual respect and trust between people who are close to one another, which is a key aspect that is the opposite of hoarding knowledge ( Connelly et al., 2012 ). Psychological safety refers to the degree to which a person feels free to be open and honest about their feelings and actions without fear of repercussions to their self-perception, social standing, or professional prospects. People are more likely to feel psychologically secure when they have connections with their coworkers based on mutual trust and support ( Kahn, 1990 ). Having excellent psychological safety means that individuals may trust their colleagues and not be ashamed or penalized for expressing themselves since interpersonal situations are not harmful ( Zhang and Bartol, 2010 ). Instead, someone who has a low sense of psychological safety may develop sentiments of distrust toward their coworkers, believing that they would do them harm ( Connelly et al., 2012 ). Obi et al. (2020) , have claimed that interpersonal mistrust can affect an individual’s knowledge hoarding practices. The inability to place faith in one’s coworkers may lead to hoarding information from one’s colleagues, which indicates poor psychological safety. Second, high levels of psychological safety encourage employees to share work-related knowledge with others and are less afraid of the recipient’s feedback ( Zhao and Jiang, 2021 ; Zada et al., 2022a ). Ehrhart (2004) argues that having regular conversations with coworkers on work-related events promotes the development of shared meanings and collective assessments of workplaces. Thus, the likelihood of employees expressing opinions with one another and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing amongst themselves increases when they feel comfortable and safe in their workplace ( Connelly et al., 2012 ).

Hypothesis 3: There is a negative relationship between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding.

The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety

The emotional trust between leaders and followers must be considered when evaluating the quality of social interaction between the two parties. For leaders to be trusted by their followers, trust creates the strong bond between leader and their followers. Trust in the leader has a favorable impact on various outcomes, including organizational citizenship behavior, performance, and satisfaction ( Chughtai, 2016 ; Sun et al., 2020a ). According to Edmondson and Lei (2014) , one of the most critical factors that contribute to psychological safety is a workplace that encourages open communication and mutual respect amongst co-workers and the ability to share information ( Ullah et al., 2021 ; Khan et al., 2022a ). Many studies have also stated that leaders who demonstrate an embodied service attitude and create an atmosphere of service help their employees to experience psychological safety ( Liden et al., 2014 ; Zada et al., 2022a , b ). Having a psychologically safe environment would alleviate any concerns about team members’ reactions that make the member feel ashamed or frightened. In an environment where people feel safe and do not fear the ramifications of taking interpersonal risks, people are less inclined to hoard knowledge. A servant leadership create good environment which fosters this kind of climate. In particular, prior studies have shown that servant leadership may prevent knowledge hoarding ( Song et al., 2015 ; Zhuang et al., 2021 ). Psychological safety is seen as a crucial precondition for exchanging knowledge ( Edmondson et al., 2004 ; Zada et al., 2021 ), and the importance of servant leadership in enhancing psychological safety cannot be overstated ( Eva et al., 2019 ). Through the creation of psychological safety, servant leadership is logically expected to reduce the tendency of its followers to hoard their knowledge ( Sendjaya, 2015 ; Wu S. et al., 2021 ). This suggests that servant leadership is a significant antecedent to psychological safety, reducing the likelihood of knowledge hoarding. Thus, we hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 4: The link between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding is mediated by psychological safety.

The Moderating Effect of Mastery Climate

According to C̀erne et al. (2014) , a situational factor that effect knowledge hoarding behavior has been identified as mastery climate. Furthermore, theories of social learning and psychological safety expressly imply the presence of a mastery climate. As a consequence of the increased psychological safety given by a high mastery atmosphere, the connection between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding should be reduced. Moreover, an environment of mastery may lessen the desire to hoard knowledge ( Nerstad et al., 2013 ). To achieve success in a mastery climate, a significant focus must be placed on teamwork ( C̀erne et al., 2014 ). Employees actually should be less inclined to participate in knowledge hoarding as long as their actions are communicated to be publicly acknowledged, anticipated, and rewarded in this manner. A study of Poortvliet and Giebels (2012) indicates that this propensity may be ascribed to employees’ desire to continue seeking methods to develop themselves, and they are unable to admit this by hoarding information. It is possible that employees in a mastery workplace will be more motivated to recognize their self-improvement. They put greater emphasis on it, promoting their skill development by engaging in less knowledge hoarding behavior and seeking constructive cooperation. Knowledge hoarding is affected by psychological safety and mastery climate from an interactionist approach. Several factors contribute to reduced knowledge hoarding practices, such as a high level of psychological safety, an internal urge to discuss and share work-related information, and an atmosphere of mastery in the workplace ( Ames and Archer, 1988 ). Work environments that promote, value, and reward knowledge-sharing efforts should increase the likelihood of people with high psychological safety participating in such activities ( Siemsen et al., 2009 ). Knowledge hoarding is more likely to be practiced by people who have a poor sense of psychological safety or live in an environment that discourages the communication or sharing of information and ideas. Therefore, psychological safety encourages team members to take risks and lessens the motive for knowledge hoarding in a climate with a high level of mastery. We therefore hypothesize:

Hypothesis 5: A mastery climate will moderate the link between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding. The higher the level of mastery climate the weaker the relation and vice versa.

Leaders may create psychological safety in their organizations by fostering the mastery climate, attitudes, and behaviors among members of their organizations. Mastery climates—in which team members appreciate each other’s contributions, care about their well-being, and have influence into how the team works—are the most essential driver of psychological safety and therefore prevent knowledge hoarding. We hypothesized that a mastery climate would have a conditional influence on the strength of the indirect link between ethical leadership and knowledge hoarding, as seen in Figure 1 , revealing a pattern of moderated mediation between the variables in our study. Specifically, we hypothesize that in a high (low) mastery climate, there is a low (high) relationship between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding.

Hypothesis 5a: Mastery climate will impact how servant leadership and knowledge hoarding are mediated through psychological safety; when the mastery climate is high, the indirect effect of servant leadership on knowledge hoarding will be low.

Materials and Methods

Sample and procedure.

We gathered data from subordinates and supervisors working in various corporate sectors in Pakistan to compile the research study data was collected from (47.23% in textile; 32.45% in information technology; 20.32% in manufacturing). The author could access the participants because of their professional and personal connections(s). One of the authors contacted the team supervisors to inform them of the study’s findings. The departments of the organizations were considered teams. The questionnaires were distributed in two parts: subordinates and the supervisors (T1 and T2). Before being delivered, the questionnaires were coded with a unique identification code to match both phases’ questionnaires. Under the condition that they could acquire a copy of the results, the teams agreed to participate. Participation was entirely optional, and respondents were guaranteed that their replies would remain anonymous. We told them that all given information will be deleted from the database to protect the participants’ privacy. The data collection was done in two rounds, each separated by 6 weeks, to minimize the possible common method biases identified by Podsakoff et al. (2003) . Data collection should not be delayed for an excessively long or concise period, according to Podsakoff et al. (2012) . Leadership styles and employee turnover may disturb employee’s perceptions if the time lag is too long ( Babalola et al., 2017 ). However, if the time lag is too small, employees will go with the same approach as previous ( Babalola et al., 2017 ). As a result, 6 weeks should be the ideal time lag to choose ( Babalola et al., 2017 ). In phase one, 356 responses were obtained from 382 workers polled regarding servant leadership and psychological safety, knowledge hoarding and demographics (93.1%). Eighty-eight supervisors were questioned for their thoughts on the mastery climate, and we got responses out of 77 (87.5%). In the second phase, we reach out to respondents who participated in the first phase. Three hundred and fifty-six employees and 77 supervisors responded to the study and submitted their completed surveys. Respondents with missing data were excluded from the final sample ( Shin et al., 2012 ). At last we received (287 employees and 60 supervisors) data as a final sample for analysis. Their demographic statistics show that the male participation ratio was 72.32%, with an average of 34.51 years. A total of 76.2% of employees participated with a master’s degree or above.

Servant Leadership

The Servant leader scale adopted from Liden et al. (2015) , was employed in the current study. It consists of 7 items with good to excellent Cronbach alpha values (α = 0.95).

Knowledge Hoarding

We used a 4-item scale developed by Evans et al. (2014) to assess knowledge hoarding. Sample items from this scale included “I keep news about what I am doing secret from others until the appropriate time” (α = 0.92).

Psychological Safety

The 5-item scale developed by Liang et al. (2012) was used to assess psychological safety. A sample item is “Nobody in my unit will pick on me even if I have different opinions” (α = 0.80).

Mastery Climate

We used Nerstad et al. (2013) a 6-item scale to assess mastery climate. A sample item is “In my department/workgroup, team members are encouraged to cooperate and exchange thoughts and ideas mutually” (α = 0.75).

Control Variables

Employee’s demographics (age, gender, and educational level) have impacted workers’ knowledge practices in the past ( Connelly et al., 2012 ; Zhao et al., 2016 ; Fong et al., 2018 ). Thus, we controlled demographic variables in this study. Furthermore, educational levels of employees have been controlled (1 = Secondary school certificate; 2 = HSSC; 3 = master; 4 = M.Phil./Ph.D.). Employees genders were codded (Female = 0 and Male = 1).

Descriptive Statistics

Correlation and scale reliability are shown in Table 1 , together with mean values and standard deviations. All of the research variables’ correlations were in the predicted directions, as indicated in Table 1 , and all of the study variables were internally consistent. The servant leadership of workers was shown to be positive correlated with psychological safety ( r = 0.32, p < 0.01) and negatively related to knowledge hoarding ( r = −0.146, p > 0.05). Furthermore, employees’ psychological safety was negatively related to knowledge hoarding ( r = −0.172, p < 0.01). The data reliability was further tested by rho_A mechanism, the results shows (see Table 1 ) that all values are greater the cutoff scores of 0.7 ( Dijkstra and Henseler, 2015 ; Henseler et al., 2015 ). The convergent validity was determined by evaluating factors loading, composite reliability and average variance extracted (see Table 2 ), all values are in acceptable range (CR < 0.7, and AVE < 0.5), thus confirming composite validity. The discriminant validity was checked through HTMT ratio, the results shows in Table 3 , that all values are below than 0.85, confirming discriminant validity ( Henseler et al., 2015 ).

Table 1. Mean, standard deviation, correlations, reliability, and rho_A.

Table 2. Factors loadings.

Table 3. Heterotrait–monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMTs).

Construct Validity

Before testing the study hypotheses, we followed ( Anderson and Gerbing, 1988 ) recommendations and by examined the variables’ construct validity. We used AMOS 18.0 to run a series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) to investigate the construct uniqueness of our model’s four primary variables. Our servant leadership, psychological safety, and knowledge hoarding measurements all originated from the same source. With all fit indices falling within acceptable ranges, the four-factor model generated adequate results (χ 2 = 213.34, CFI = 0.92, TLI = 0.91, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMR = 0.03). The four-component model was compared to a one-factor model, which comprised of a single factor (χ 2 = 632.43, CFI = 0.57, TLI = 0.37, RMSEA = 0.42, SRMR = 0.47) (see Table 4 ).

Table 4. Confirmatory factor analyses and construct validity.

Common Method Variance

There is a risk of common bias while the data were gathered from a single source ( Podsakoff et al., 2003 ). According to Chang et al. (2010) , Harman’s single factor test was employed to investigate this issue. The results showed that the variation explained by a single component was 24.23%, which is far less than the 50% cutoff score. Further, to confirm the common method biasness, we compare different models with the four-factor model. The results show that our four-factor model best fits the one-factor model. This confirms that there is no issue of common method biasness in the current study (see Table 4 ).

Hypothesis Testing

For our direct research hypothesis, we analyzed the data in Table 5 . As shown in Hypothesis 1, a negative relation exists between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding ( B = −0.057, SE = 0.67). Hypothesis 2 stated that servant leadership is positively linked with psychological safety ( B = 0.452 ∗∗∗ , SE = 0.040). Furthermore, Hypothesis 3 shows a negative association between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding ( B = −0.104, SE = 0.077). Moreover, Hypothesis 4, which illustrates the mediation results of our study, we used the bootstrapping method ( Preacher and Hayes, 2004 ), utilizing the Process macro Model 4 ( Hayes and Rockwood, 2017 ). The CI for the indirect effect of servant leadership on knowledge hoarding through psychological safety does not include “0” (−0.1675, −0.0117), supporting the existence of partial mediation (see Table 6 ). Next, to test Hypothesis 5, we assessed the (psychological safety × mastery climate) interaction term for predicting knowledge hoarding. This interaction term is significant (β = −0.34, p < 0.001, CL = LLCI = −0.1675, ULCI = −0.0117) (see Table 7 ). The link between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding is moderated by mastery climate as a simple slop test shows in Figure 2 . When mastery climate was high, the relation will be weak. To test the moderation mediation effect in Hypothesis 6, we applied ( Hayes and Preacher, 2013 ; Hayes, 2017 ) macro model 7. The 95% bootstrap confidence intervals for the conditional indirect impact of servant leadership on knowledge hoarding through psychological safety at the low level (−1 SD) were generated by this approach ( MacKinnon et al., 2004 ) and Mean level of the mastery climate did not contain zero (LLCI = 0.2157, ULCI = 0.4350), respectively, at the moderator’s high (+1 SD) level, they did not have zero (LLCI = 0.5216 ULCI = 0.8351), indicating that mastery climate serves as a moderator against the indirect effect of servant leadership on knowledge hoarding, via psychological safety, in support of Hypothesis 6 ( Table 8 ).

Table 5. Regression results.

Table 6. Mediation analysis.

Table 7. Moderation analysis.

Figure 2. Interaction effect.

Table 8. Moderated mediation model.

Grounded on social learning theory, we examined the link between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. The findings indicate that servant leadership and knowledge hoarding are negatively associated. Our research looked at the mediating function of psychological safety, and the findings revealed that psychological safety is a partial mediator in this relationship. A mastery climate was used as a moderator between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding, and results stated that mastery climate moderates the negative association between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding. Further, in situations where the mastery climate was strong rather than low, the indirect influence of servant leadership on knowledge hoarding via psychological safety was less apparent than in situations where the mastery climate was inadequate or non-existent.

Theoretical Implications

Several theoretical additions are made to the literature on servant leadership and knowledge hoarding due to this research. First, Positive leader behaviors influence the development of knowledge hoarding practices, and our results add to a deeper understanding of this impact. Previous research on the relationship between leadership and knowledge management has mostly focused on finding successful knowledge management activities, such as knowledge sharing ( Xiao et al., 2017 ). Servant leadership and knowledge sharing have been studied by Bavik et al. (2018) . On the other hand, the effect of leadership on detrimental knowledge behaviors such as knowledge hoarding has been largely unexplored until recently ( Connelly et al., 2012 ). Participants in their research, on the other hand, were full-time workers. This is the first research to look specifically at the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding in the workplace, and it is the first of its kind in the workplace. Second, according to the results, psychological safety was shown to be a key intervening element in the link between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. According to social learning theory and the psychological safety viewpoint, servant leadership may contribute to the growth of employees’ psychological safety, preventing knowledge hoarding. Overall, the findings demonstrate the potential advantages of servant leadership and the fact that its impact on knowledge hoarding is mediated via the psychological safety of those who follow it. Third, the outcomes of this study show that the indirect link between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding through psychological safety is contingent on the existence of a mastery climate in the organization. Psychological safety has a more significant influence on knowledge hoarding in a low mastery environment than in a high mastery climate, as seen in Figure 2 . Additionally, as a consequence of this study, we have been able to identify the contextual boundary elements that impact the nature of the servant leadership–knowledge hoarding relationship. This is an important addition in the body of knowledge. Fourth, this study proved that psychological safety and mastery environment affect knowledge hoarding. It also looked into mastery climate as a mediator in the link between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding. Lastly, with Edwards and Lambert (2007) moderated mediation technique, we observed that psychological safety has a considerable impact on the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding, depending on the level of mastery climate in the organization.

Practical Implications

The findings of our research also have managerial implications. First, we urge managers to put the needs of their teams and organizations ahead of their interests. Managers do not place a high value on achieving their personal goals. They need to help their employees to attain a goal ( Khan et al., 2022c ). Organizational progress and well-being should be manager’s primary concern, not personal gain. On the other hand, traditional leadership is characterized by the amassing and exercise of authority by a person at the “head of the pyramid.” The servant-leader shares authority prioritizes the needs of others, and encourages employees to reach their full potential. This kind of endeavor is beneficial since it can increase the psychological safety of each employee. Workers who report feeling secure in their positions are less likely to engage in knowledge hoarding. Organizations can provide training programs to cultivate leaders’ professionalism give examples of serving conduct that leaders should demonstrate in their management policies and day-to-day behavior. Establish formal and informal mentoring programs to assist leaders in improving their serving leadership abilities. Second, the findings of our study indicate that a mastery atmosphere seems to be an ideal work environment for lowering employees’ propensity to hoard their knowledge. Organizations may reduce the incidence of knowledge hoarding practices by cultivating a mastery environment that encourages learning, cooperation, and skill development. Managers, for example, may foster a mastery atmosphere by offering particular training and development programs that enable workers to acquire job-related abilities, recognize the importance of teamwork, and recognize the conditions for success and failure during task completion. Also, to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange, managers might establish institutionalized platforms or channels. They may be advantageous in developing a mastery climate, which will prevent the occurrence of knowledge hoarding from happening. Third, the outcomes of our research demonstrated that psychological safety plays an essential role in controlling the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding in organizations. To protect the psychological safety of their employees, managers should take proactive measures. Psychological safety is dynamic and may be enhanced via healthy leader-member interactions ( Frazier et al., 2017 ). Managers, for example, should communicate with workers openly and transparently and offer them a psychologically stable workplace. The perceived psychological safety of workers will increase due to this, and knowledge hoarding practices will be reduced.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

Every study has some limitations that should be addressed in the future. This study also has some limitations. First, this study was examined at individual and team levels. Therefore, we have to control demographics at both levels. However, organizational culture plays a crucial role in knowledge management (i.e., knowledge sharing, knowledge hoarding) and effect employees knowledge hoarding behavior. Future research should control organization culture. Second, our sample is from Pakistani corporate culture, where trust matters among individuals compared to other organizational factors. Many organizations are family-run and have reference base jobs in some scenarios. Our study results are therefore not generally applicable to other countries. The different organization have a different culture that influences employees. Accordingly, we suggest that the same conceptual model be tested in other settings. We have grounded this study based on social learning theory and examined the link between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. Further, it is suggested to link other approaches to this model, i.e., social cognitive theory. It is also suggested that other potential mediators should be used in the future, i.e., psychological capital and psychological empowerment may minimize employees’ intention toward knowledge hoarding. In addition, we have used mastery climate as a potential moderator in this study because such climate believes in support, cooperation and emphasis on team and individual development. Further, it is suggested to study other potential moderators, i.e., organization commitment and interpersonal trust. For example, Connelly et al. (2012) indicated that when employees are committed to organization are less likely to hoard knowledge, because they view responding to coworkers’ requests as their professional responsibility. To effectively create, share, and utilize knowledge in teams, individuals must trust one another. To be successful in a team environment, it is critical to have complete faith in the group’s ability to work together and share information. These processes are influenced by the degree of interpersonal trust relationships.

Effective knowledge management is impossible without effective leadership. A leader is thus the one who should establish an organization that fosters the development, sharing, and application of new knowledge inside organizations. This study provides a negative association between servant leadership and knowledge hoarding. Servant leadership play a key role in knowledge sharing among employees. Further, psychological safety mediates this relationship significantly. Furthermore, this study illustrates that mastery climate plays a moderating role in between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding, presence of mastery climate weakens the link between psychological safety and knowledge hoarding. The integrated model illustrates that the importance of servant leadership that encourage and cultivate safe atmosphere to prevent knowledge hoarding in the organization. This study is important to body of knowledge by introducing new leadership style with knowledge hoarding, that is unexplored till date. With these findings in mind, this work serves as a helpful study for further research into additional components and processes that impede knowledge hoarding.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Author Contributions

SZ, JK, ZJ, and IS contributed to the conception and design of the study. SZ organized the database. JK performed the statistical analysis. SZ, JK, and IS wrote the first draft of the manuscript. ZJ, AV-M, and NC-B wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Scientific and Technological Innovation Talents Support Program for Colleges and Universities of Henan Province (Humanities and Social Sciences) (No. 2020- cx-28), the Basic Research Project of Philosophy and Social Science in Henan Province (No. 2022-JCZD-04), and ILMA University, Karachi, Pakistan.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords : mastery climate, psychological safety, knowledge hoarding, servant leadership, workplace

Citation: Zada S, Khan J, Saeed I, Jun ZY, Vega-Muñoz A and Contreras-Barraza N (2022) Servant Leadership Behavior at Workplace and Knowledge Hoarding: A Moderation Mediation Examination. Front. Psychol. 13:888761. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.888761

Received: 03 March 2022; Accepted: 13 April 2022; Published: 04 May 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Zada, Khan, Saeed, Jun, Vega-Muñoz and Contreras-Barraza. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Shagufta Zada, [email protected] ; Zhang Yong Jun, [email protected]

† ORCID: Jawad Khan, orcid.org/0000-0002-6673-7617 ; Alejandro Vega-Muñoz, orcid.org/0000-0002-9427-2044 ; Nicolás Contreras-Barraza, orcid.org/0000-0001-6729-4398

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

A Systematic Literature Review of Servant Leadership Theory in Organizational Contexts

• Published: 22 April 2012
• Volume 113 , pages 377–393, ( 2013 )

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• Denise Linda Parris 1 &
• Jon Welty Peachey 2  

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A new research area linked to ethics, virtues, and morality is servant leadership. Scholars are currently seeking publication outlets as critics debate whether this new leadership theory is significantly distinct, viable, and valuable for organizational success. The aim of this study was to identify empirical studies that explored servant leadership theory by engaging a sample population in order to assess and synthesize the mechanisms, outcomes, and impacts of servant leadership. Thus, we sought to provide an evidence-informed answer to how does servant leadership work, and how can we apply it? We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR), a methodology adopted from the medical sciences to synthesize research in a systematic, transparent, and reproducible manner. A disciplined screening process resulted in a final sample population of 39 appropriate studies. The synthesis of these empirical studies revealed: (a) there is no consensus on the definition of servant leadership; (b) servant leadership theory is being investigated across a variety of contexts, cultures, and themes; (c) researchers are using multiple measures to explore servant leadership; and (d) servant leadership is a viable leadership theory that helps organizations and improves the well-being of followers. This study contributes to the development of servant leadership theory and practice. In addition, this study contributes to the methodology for conducting SLRs in the field of management, highlighting an effective method for mapping out thematically, and viewing holistically, new research topics. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research.

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Parris, D.L., Peachey, J.W. A Systematic Literature Review of Servant Leadership Theory in Organizational Contexts. J Bus Ethics 113 , 377–393 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1322-6

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