The Impact Of Servant Leadership On Employees’ In-role Performance, Innovative Behavior And Helping Behavior

As a value-laden leadership, Servant leadership is catching more attention when contemporaryorganizations are plagued by systemic problems. Employees’ in-role performance, innovativebehavior and helping behavior are keys for the development of contemporary organizations. Itcomes down to the conclution that research on how servant leadership may influence employee’behaviors mentioned above becomes necessary. Based on regulatory focus theory, the current studylooked into the mechanism of improving employees’ behaviors on the individual level. Throughliterature review, questionnaire survey, data statistics and analysis, it was proved thatindividual-level servant leadership predict higher level of in-role performance, innovative behaviorand helping behavior, and this effect is mediated by employees’situational regulatory focus.The current study has three main findings. First, employees’ perceptions of superiors’ servantleadership behaviors predict high level of in-role performance, innovative behavior and helpingbehavior. Second, servant leadership can induce employees’ situational regulatory focus, throughwhich affect employees’ in-role performance, innovative behavior and helping behavior. Third,servant leadership can greatly improve employees’ in-role performance for the individuals with themaster’s degree and above, or with one year and below/four years and above work experience.Besides, compared to the state-owned enterprises, servant leadership is not the good choice forforeign companies and joint ventures to improve subordinates’helping behavior.The above findings include two theotetical contributions. First, this study extends the study ofservant leadership in China by testing a model in which employees’ situational regulatory focus atwork mediates the influence of servant leadership on employee behavior. Second, this study extendsthe study of regulatory focus theory by introducing to the research field of organizational behaviors.Besides, the study has practical contribution, providing managers with a possible way to improvesubordinates’in-role performance, innovative behavior and helping behavior.