Too Far Is as Bad as Not Enough: The Inverted U-Shape Relationship
Between Servant Leadership and Team Outcomes
Abstract
Servant leadership has received a great deal of academic attention in
recent years, and its core tenet is a servant-oriented leadership style
for followers. Previous research has found positive effects of servant
leadership, while this paper challenges this finding and offers a new
perspective. Servant leadership emphasizes the service and assistance
for all followers. However, as leaders have limited resources and time,
servant leadership has the possibility to decentralize leaders’
attention, thus affecting team effectiveness. Based on a survey
including 109 leaders and 636 followers, we find an inverted U-shape
relationship between servant leadership behavior and the team-level
in-role performance and extra-role organizational citizenship
behavior (OCB) through team leader-member exchange differentiation
(LMXD). Thus, this study extends the research on servant leadership and
suggests that the middle level servant leadership behavior benefits team
development most.