The Influence Of Servant Leadership By CEOs On Organizational Effectiveness And Middle Managers

One industry’s prosperity depends on its organizations’ survival and development.The survival and development of any organization are closely related to the behavior and performance of the top leaders. Particularly, as the strategic leaders of corporations, CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) must bear all the responsibilities of the success as well as the failure of their organizations. Consequently, studies on CEOs keep emerging. Based on review of CEO literature, I found that previous studies on CEOs mainly focused on their demographics, psychological and cognitive characteristics. In my current study, however, we insist that CEOs’ other characteristics, including their leadership style can also exert an important impact on organizational outcomes. In addition, more and more moral and human care needs are attached to management, and people are paying more and more attention to the concerns of the whole society including the stakeholders of organizations and the pursuit of employees’ well-being. All of these put forward new demands for our understanding of leadership. On such condition, servant leadership, originating from ethical and caring behaviors is playing an increasingly important role in organization.On the basis of review and analysis of existing literatures and relying on social learning theory,collective learning theory and upper echelon theory,I have made a deep exploration on the relationship between CEOs’ servant leadership and organization as well as middle managers. Meanwhile, I offered an accurate explain about the mechanism that CEOs exert their influence on both organizations and middle managers. The research method of this paper is that the author put forward the research hypothesis, and then used the questionnaire survey method to verify the hypotheses. The hypotheses of current study are that: on organization level, I maintain that CEO’s servant leadership would exert positive influence on organization effectiveness through their impact on TMT cohesion. While on individual level,servant leadership by CEOs could promote the establishment of empowerment climate through their influence on TMT cohension. Such empowerment climate then will have an effect on middle managers’ psychological empowerment which will finally improve their attitudes and behaviors. Based on the analysis above, I come up with the hypotheses. To test these hypotheses, I adopt questionnaire survey method.Based on the well-developed scale at home and abroad, I designed research quetionnarie. After the small samples pretest, I ask experts and enterprise staffs for advice. With reference to their advice, I revise and refine questionnaires. Using the finally revised questionnaire, I then conduct a large-scale data collection on cultural creative industry in TongZhou. Finally, after reliability and validity analysis, as well as common method bias test, I test the hypotheses in this study.The empirical resuts indicate that: at the organizational level, CEO servant leadership would exert positive effects on organizational effectiveness through its’influence on the TMT cohesion and the organizational empowerment climate; at individual level, the CEO servant leadership would have a positive impact on middle managers’ in-role performance, organizational affect commitment and stay intention through its’ influcne on their psychological empowerment.The main innovation points of my research: 1) previous studies of CEO are chiefly focus on direct impact of CEOs’ strategic choice and formulation on organization, little of them adopt an organization process perspective and make some investigations of the organizational mechanism through which CEOs’ leadership can exert an influence on organization as well as their employees. Based on social learning theory and collectivesocial learning theory, I make a detailed enrichment of the role of CEOs servant leadership in organization. Firstly, CEOs’ servant leadership would have an influence on TMT members, whose behaviors will then make an effect on employees’ attitude and behaviors, as well as organizational effectiveness. 2) My study also enriches and develops servant leadership theory. Previous studies on servant leadership only pay attention to the direct effect of servant leaders on their followers. Focusing on CEOs’ servant leadership, this study investigates the indirect effect of servant leadership, and tries to make a clear explanation of how CEOs’servant leadership would come across organization level and exert an influence on their indirect reports. In addition, my study conducts a comprehensive exploration on the impact of servant leadership on both organizational level and individual level,which will be of benefit for deep understanding of effectiveness of servant leadership.3) This study also makes some contributions to empowerment theory. I introduce empowerment climate and psychological empowerment into my exploration of servant leadership’s mechanism. The studies of psychological empowerment are relatively mature, while most of which focus on the linear effect of psychological empowerment, namely, the impact of psychological empowerment on other variables at the same level. Also, there are few studies exploring cross-level effect of psychological empowerment. In this study, I insist that servant leadership by CEOs can influence middle managers’ psychological empowerment by exerting impact on the development of empowerment climate.