Servant Leadership and Serving Culture: Influence on Individual and Unit Performance

In a sample of 961 employees working in 71 restaurants of a moderately sized restaurant chain, we investigated a key tenet of servant leadership theory—that servant leaders guide followers to emulate the leader's behavior by prioritizing the needs of others above their own. We developed and tested a model contending that servant leaders propagate servant leadership behaviors among followers by creating a serving culture, which directly influences unit (i.e., restaurant/store) performance and enhances individual attitudes and behaviors directly and through the mediating influence of individuals' identification with the unit. As hypothesized, serving culture was positively related both to restaurant performance and employee job performance, creativity, and customer service behaviors, and negatively related to turnover intentions, both directly and through employee identification with the restaurant. Same-source common method bias was reduced by employing five sources of data: employees, restaurant managers, customers, internal audits by headquarters staff, and external audits by a consulting firm.