Abstract
There is a great emphasis on the importance of serving communities and the need to study servant leadership in recent higher education literature. Yet, academics’ community citizenship behavior has not been examined through applied research. To address these issues, our study aims at investigating the effects of two dimensions of servant leadership (behaving ethically and helping subordinates grow and succeed) on job satisfaction and community citizenship behavior. The context of our multi-level study is the Malaysian higher education. To estimate our theoretical model, we employed the EQS 6.4 statistical package and analyzed the data collected from 1876 lecturers from 120 departments using a multi-level structural equation modeling (MSEM) methodology. Our results revealed two completely different model structures at both lecturer and department levels. More specifically, while both the predictors were useful for explaining the outcome variables at the lecturer level, we observed that only behaving ethically was a significant predictor of community citizenship behavior at the department level. We discuss the findings in detail and elaborate on the implications of the findings with respect to policy and practice, theory, and methodology. We also address limitations and make recommendations for future research.
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Data availability
The dataset used to estimate the final model has been published in HARVARD DATAVERSE and is freely accessible here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KU4BTW.
Notes
A focused university offers programs in specific areas related to its establishment. The ratio of undergraduate to postgraduate students in focused universities is 70:30.
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the support of our families to finish this manuscript during unprecedented global crises and workplace upheaval. Also, the first author dedicates the paper to his father, Ali Naghi Ghasemy, and his late mother, Zahra Soltan Zamani, for their unconditional care and love. This paper is based on a research project related to the theory and practice of servant leadership in academic institutions led by Majid Ghasemy with co-researcher Hazri Jamil.
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This research study was supported by the Universiti Sains Malaysia (Grant Number: 304/CIPPTN/6315200).
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Ghasemy, M., Akbarzadeh, M. & Gaskin, J.E. Being satisfied and serving communities as outcomes of servant leadership in the academic context: policies based on a multi-level structural equation model. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 23, 69–86 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-021-09702-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-021-09702-z