Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment

Abstract

Servant leadership stresses personal integrity and serving others, including employees, customers, and communities. This article focuses on a servant leadership measure that was created by identifying 9 dimensions. Relevant items were then developed and subjected to factor analysis with a sample of 298 students, resulting in a 7-factor solution. Using an organizational sample of 182 individuals, we verified this 7-factor model with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). We further validated our 28-item servant leadership scale by regressing outcomes on the servant leadership dimensions, controlling for transformational leadership and leader-member exchange (LMX) in a multi-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis. The results suggest that servant leadership is a multidimensional construct and at the individual level makes a unique contribution beyond transformational leadership and LMX in explaining community citizenship behaviors, in-role performance, and organizational commitment. No between-leader (group-level) differences were found in the outcomes variables. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.