Topic：A social context model of servant leadership and organizational citizenship behavior: The mediating roles of felt obligation and psychological entitlement

Time: From 14:00 on November 29, 2019 

Venue: 1722, Rear Main Building Presenter：

Wei Si，Postdoctoral researcher，School of Economics and Management, Tongji University

Abstract

A key proposition about servant leadership is that servant leaders foster servant subordinates, which has been reiterated and reinforced by theoretical and empirical works on servant leadership. In this talk, I will report a study that advances a more nuanced view on this proposition. Drawing on reflected appraisal and social comparison theories, we explain why servant leadership may imbue subordinates with a self-centered mindset. With time-lagged multi-source survey data, we show that on the one hand,  servant leadership can make subordinates feel obligated to serve the group and thereby engage in more OCB; on the other hand, such leader behavior can also enhance subordinates’ sense of entitlement to preferential treatment and thus engage in less OCB, but only when the leader does not generally exhibit servant leadership behavior to the group. This study contributes to the research on servant leadership by explaining when and how such leader behavior may inhibit subordinates from becoming servants.

Biography

Wei Si is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Economics and Management, Tongji University. He received his Ph.D. from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include justice in the workplace, self at work, and proactivity.