Bai Mayangzong, Zheng Xinyi, Huang Xu, Jing Tiantian, Yu Chenhao, Li Sisi, Zhang Zhiruo
School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
Department of Pharmacy, Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 3;14:1170490. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1170490. eCollection 2023.
Servant leadership has long been associated with maintaining employee's affective commitment, yet the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Research from non-western cultures remains scarce.
This study sought to fill in such research gap by introducing insights from social exchange theory perspective, and examined two potential mediators (viz., psychological safety and job burnout) with a largescale, representative Chinese sample.
A total of 931 staffs in a Chinese hospital were surveyed, and structural equation models revealed that psychological safety (indirect effect = 0.052, 95% Bootstrap CI = [0.002, 0.101]) and job burnout (indirect effect = 0.277, 95% Bootstrap CI = [0.226, 0.331]) parallelly (and partially) mediated the effect of servant leadership on affective commitment. Moreover, these effects held the same between permanent and temporary staffs, as well as between male and female staffs.
Results suggested that a leader's orientation to care, validate, and respond to their followers' needs was effective in creating a psychological safe environment and downplaying job burnout in workplace, in exchange to which, followers remained affectively committed to their organization in a long term. Not only did this study contribute to existing literature by providing non-western data for service leadership research, it also provided a deeper understanding of associated mechanisms of how servant leadership might cast on talent retain and organizational development in a long term. These mechanisms shed light on how serving helps leading and advocate servant leadership for hospitals, as well as other serving organizations.
长期以来，仆人式领导一直与维持员工的情感承诺相关联，但其潜在机制仍不明确。来自非西方文化的研究仍然稀缺。
本研究试图从社会交换理论的角度引入见解来填补这一研究空白，并使用大规模、具有代表性的中国样本检验了两个潜在的中介变量（即心理安全和职业倦怠）。
对一家中国医院的931名员工进行了调查，结构方程模型显示，心理安全（间接效应=0.052，95% 自助置信区间=[0.002, 0.101]）和职业倦怠（间接效应=0.277，95% 自助置信区间=[0.226, 0.331]）并行（且部分地）中介了仆人式领导对情感承诺的影响。此外，这些效应在长期员工和临时员工之间以及男性员工和女性员工之间是相同的。
结果表明，领导者关心、认可并回应下属需求的取向有效地营造了心理安全的环境，并减轻了工作场所的职业倦怠，作为回报，下属长期保持对组织的情感承诺。本研究不仅通过为仆人式领导研究提供非西方数据为现有文献做出了贡献，还更深入地理解了仆人式领导如何可能长期影响人才保留和组织发展的相关机制。这些机制揭示了服务如何有助于领导，并倡导医院以及其他服务组织采用仆人式领导。
