Development and validation of a spanish short servant leadership survey (SSLS6-3F) among spanish workers in religious non-profit organizations

Abstract

Religious non-profit organizations are becoming increasingly important in the third sector in a wide range of countries, where they are currently leading players in different areas, such as education, healthcare, and social work. These organizations have the peculiarity of providing a service to their users while transmitting them the values of their mission statement. An usually employed and effective management strategy for these institutions is a servant leadership style. This article seeks to introduce a theoretical discussion of this leadership approach by providing a Spanish version of an instrument for measuring servant leadership in Spanish religious non-profit institutions. To this end, workers of different Spanish faith-based non-profit organizations of the third sector, a relatively unexplored context, were analyzed after obtaining 463 valid questionnaires. This study used the Spanish translation of a seven-item and three-factor servant leadership scale. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was performed. The results confirm that the six-item and three-factor servant leadership scale was the most effective scale to measure this construct. In conclusion, this research covers a notable research gap by providing a reliable and valid Spanish short version of the servant leadership scale for workers of Spanish religious non-profit organizations.