Servant Leadership and Employee Openness to Change: Examining the Roles of Psychological Safety and Psychological Well-Being

Organizations facing continuous technological and institutional change increasingly depend on employees’ openness to change. This study examined whether servant leadership is associated with openness to change through psychological safety and psychological well-being. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 414 employees across 10 banking institutions in Thailand and analyzed using structural equation modeling. Servant leadership was positively associated with psychological safety, which was positively associated with both psychological well-being and openness to change. In the hypothesized model, the indirect association through psychological safety was significant, whereas the well-being and sequential pathways were not. These results were sensitive to analytic choices: the indirect association through psychological safety was not significant when a direct path was estimated or when all 450 usable responses were retained, whereas the well-being and sequential pathways became significant when all responses were retained or longer openness-to-change measures were used. Psychological safety is therefore a possible pathway, but evidence regarding the relative roles of the two mediators remains inconclusive. For organizations undergoing change, the results highlight the potential value of servant leadership and of conditions in which employees feel safe to express concerns and engage with change.