The effect of servant leadership on hotel employees’ behavioral consequences: Work engagement versus job satisfaction

Highlights

• The effect of servant leadership on work engagement is more than on job satisfaction.

• Work engagement is a mediator between servant leadership and behavioral outcomes.

• Work engagement is more effective than job satisfaction on behavioral outcomes.

Abstract

Our paper explores the impact of servant leadership on absenteeism, in-role performance, and extra-role performance via the mediating roles of work engagement and job satisfaction. Our study utilized hotel employee-supervisor dyadic data with time-lagged measurement collected in Russia. Study results reveal that the positive effect of servant leadership on work engagement is stronger than on job satisfaction. As hypothesized, work engagement is a mediator between servant leadership and job satisfaction. The mediation influence of work engagement in the linkage between servant leadership and absenteeism is greater than the mediation influence of job satisfaction. This is also true for the mediation impact of work engagement in the association between servant leadership and in-role and extra-role performances. These findings enhance current understanding about the effectiveness of work engagement versus job satisfaction regarding the effect of servant leadership on behavioral consequences.

Introduction

Frontline employees (FLEs) are important actors in the creation of a truly memorable experience for customers (Zhang et al., 2020). Despite this recognition, hotel FLEs are plagued with problems (e.g., job insecurity, inadequate pay, excessive job demands) that may erode their psychological well-being and impede effective service delivery (Cheung et al., 2019, Karatepe et al., 2020a). Therefore, management of hotels has to establish an environment where such employees are eager to devote energy to their job, exhibit low levels of nonattendance intentions/behaviors, carry out their role requirements, and meet and exceed customer expectations (e.g., Kaya and Karatepe, 2020; Swanson et al., 2020).

Servant leadership (SEL) refers to “an understanding and practice of leadership that places the good of those led over the self-interest of the leader, emphasizing leader behaviors that focus on follower development, and de-emphasizing glorification of the leader” (Hale and Fields, 2007, p. 397). Greenleaf (1977) has stated that going beyond one’s self-interest is a key characteristic of SEL. Servant leaders put employees’ interests first and help the organization establish a positive work environment where employees develop feelings of commitment to the company (Kaya and Karatepe, 2020). In this environment, servant leaders delegate authority to their followers, prioritize their growth and development, and make them know the organizational expectations (Jaramillo et al., 2015, Van Dierendonck, 2011). They do what is promised, act with honesty, see themselves stewards for the organization, and act as role models for their followers (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Since this ethical behavior of leaders penetrates the whole organization, SEL seems to be consistent with the main principles of the hospitality industry (Huertas-Valdivia et al., 2019).

SEL leads to trust in leader (Eva et al., 2019), boosts innovative behavior and adaptive performance, (Karatepe et al., 2020b, Kaya and Karatepe, 2020), activates creativity (Ruiz-Palomino and Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara, 2020), and mitigates turnover intentions (Eva et al., 2019, Karatepe et al., 2019). SEL fosters work engagement (WNG) (Ling et al., 2017), which has three components: “vigor”, “dedication”, and “absorption” (Schaufeli et al., 2006). SEL also increases job satisfaction (Ozyilmaz and Cicek, 2015), which is defined as “the pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job as achieving or facilitating the achievement of one’s job values” Locke, 1969, p. 316).

The extant literature suggests that SEL influences employees’ job performance (e.g., Ling et al., 2017). The successful implementation of SEL activates in-role performance (IRP), which highlights behaviors needed to carry out the requirements specified in the job description and bolsters extra-role performance (ERP), which touches on discretionary behaviors in serving customers in challenging service encounters (Netemeyer and Maxham, 2007). Moreover, SEL is a remedy to employees’ nonattendance intentions (Karatepe et al., 2019). There are studies that have explored the mechanisms relating SEL to work-related consequences. For instance, Ling et al.’s (2017) research in China documented that SEL better explained various variables such as WNG and hotel employee performance than authentic leadership. Their work also found that trust climate mediated the relationship between SEL and organizational commitment, while it mediated the linkage between SEL and WNG. Luu’s (2019) research in Vietnam reported that the impact of environmentally specific SEL on hotel workers’ organizational citizenship behavior was mediated by employee environmental engagement. Ghosh and Khatri’s (2018) research in India demonstrated that SEL significantly predicted service recovery-related variables among hotel employees. In Jang and Kandampully’s (2018) study, organizational commitment was found to be a mediator between SEL and service workers’ quitting intentions. A study of hotel workers in Palestine revealed that climate for creativity mediated the effect of SEL on innovative behavior and management innovation (Karatepe et al., 2020b).

Against this background, the purpose of our paper is to propose a conceptual model that investigates the interrelationships of SEL, WNG, job satisfaction, absenteeism, IRP, and ERP. By doing so, our study assesses the effectiveness of WNG versus job satisfaction concerning the impact of SEL on the aforesaid behavioral consequences. In light of this, the objectives of our paper are to: (a) examine whether the impact of SEL on WNG is stronger than on job satisfaction; (b) investigate whether WNG mediates the impact of SEL on job satisfaction; (c) explore whether WNG exerts a more negative impact on absenteeism and a more positive impact on IRP and ERP than job satisfaction; and (d) ascertain whether the mediation influence of WNG on absenteeism, IRP, and ERP is stronger than the mediation influence of job satisfaction.

Our paper makes several contributions to current knowledge. First, Kašpárková et al. (2018) state, “…evidence that work engagement offers a unique explanatory variance beyond that of traditional job satisfaction is a contribution to the debate about work engagement’s ultimate utility as a construct” (p. 53). By providing a comparison between WNG and job satisfaction as the two mediators, we strive to understand FLEs’ affective responses to SEL as being important for their performance outcomes. Specifically, WNG is a more proximal construct to performance outcomes (e.g., Kašpárková et al., 2018; Karatepe et al., 2018). Hotel or restaurant employees high on WNG complete their daily tasks successfully and display extra-role customer service behaviors (Grobelna, 2019, Orlowski et al., 2021). However, evidence is needed whether WNG still boosts both IRP and ERP when job satisfaction is considered as an additional predictor. More importantly, in the SEL-related research, no empirical piece has examined the effectiveness of WNG versus job satisfaction in the association between SEL and employees’ behavioral consequences such as absenteeism, IRP, and ERP so far. Since both WNG and job satisfaction are motivational variables and there are studies questioning the uniqueness of the construct of WNG (Cole et al., 2012, Macey and Schneider, 2008), we test whether WNG still mediates the effect of SEL on these work-related consequences when job satisfaction is included as an additional mediator.

Second, plenty of studies in the hospitality and tourism literature have utilized a single mediator (Kaya and Karatepe, 2020). Using a single mediator is likely to give rise to “…discovering specious mediators, mediators that appear to channel an effect but do not in fact do so” (Fischer et al., 2017, p. 1728). Such a potential problem has been underscored in a meta-analytic work in which a number of differential pathways relating ethical leadership to normative conduct have been examined (Peng and Kim, 2020). With this realization, we focus on two mediators simultaneously linking SEL to the aforesaid outcomes.