Linking servant leadership to follower emotional exhaustion through impression management

Abstract

We argue that servant leaders convey expectations that one needs to behave self-sacrificially, support others and perform well. Perceiving organizational politics heightens the concern of being seen as meeting these expectations and contributes to the belief that impression management is necessary to achieve desired outcomes. Thus, to make impressions consistent with a servant leader's expectations, employees enact exemplification, ingratiation, and self-promotion, but doing so is emotionally exhausting. We conducted 2 three-wave survey studies in China (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2), and the results generally supported our theory. Study 1 results showed that servant leadership had positive relationships with exemplification and ingratiation, although the theorized mediation effect of impression management was not significant. Study 2 replicated the positive relationships between servant leadership and impression management. Servant leadership also had positive indirect effects on emotional exhaustion through both exemplification and ingratiation. Perceptions of organizational politics strengthened the positive effect of servant leadership on impression management, resulting in a stronger indirect effect on exhaustion. We discuss the findings' implications for servant leadership research and practice.