Kim, K.Y. and Liden, R.C. (2025) CEO Servant Leadership and Organizational Profitability: A Social Exchange Perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior. ISSN 0894-3796
Abstract
Servant leaders emphasize serving others before themselves. Emerging evidence indicates that servant leadership results in a variety of positive outcomes, including favorable job attitudes and enhanced job performance. Extending this line of research, we examine how and when CEO servant leadership benefits the organizational bottom line (e.g., organizational profitability). Drawing upon multisource data from 102 organizations, our ordinary least squares regression analyses reveal that CEO servant leadership is associated with workforce obligation, subsequently leading to enhanced organizational profitability, particularly when workforce exchange ideology is high. The findings suggest that workforce obligation serves as an important mediating mechanism, while workforce exchange ideology acts as a critical boundary condition for the performance effect of CEO servant leadership. This research provides new insights as to how and why servant leadership relates to organizational financial performance.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of an article published in Journal of Organizational Behavior, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | exchange ideology; organizational profitability; servant leader behaviors; servant leadership; workforce obligation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Management Division (LUBS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 03 Mar 2025 12:40 |
Last Modified: | 04 Mar 2025 02:56 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/job.2866 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:223887 |