impact of servant leadership on frontline employee’s creativity

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to study the impact of servant leadership on frontline employee’s creativity, with a mediating role of top management support. Servant leadership is a leadership approach where the leader is looking forward to serving the company (Kwon, 2016). This type of leadership approach is directed towards the people of the organization; the leaders seek to be empathetic towards employees (Parris and Peachey, 2013). Servant leadership provides employees with a working environment where they can improve their skills significantly (Rachmawati and Lantu, 2014). The research has, therefore, reviewed the aspect of employee creativity and how it can be nourished under servant leadership with support from top management. The research has been conducted with three variables; servant leadership is the independent variable, while employee creativity is the dependent variable for the study with top management support is the mediating variable of the study.

To conduct the study, the researcher employed a secondary research approach, where critical journal articles were reviewed, and conclusions and findings from these articles have been summarised to discuss the topic under research critically. According to a study conducted by Yang et al. (2019), they have found that employee creativity has a positive association with servant leadership. The research suggests that servant leadership provides psychological empowerment to employees. The study indicates that psychological empowerment acts as a mediator to affect servant leadership on the employee, boosting their willingness for creativity.

The findings of the study by Kwon (2016) suggest that servant leaders have a favorable implication of employee creativity. Still, top management support can be a critical factor in determining how this creativity is applied. Here the study considers managers in the position of servant leaders and suggests that there is more significant benefit for the organization to have a large number of manager working as servant leaders as they provide better motivation to employees and help them increase their skills and abilities and apply them at the workplace under positive influence of servant leaders (Kwon, 2016).

The findings of this study have practical implications for managers in the workplace (Parris and Peachey, 2013). The results of the survey conducted by Rachmawati and Lantu (2014) make a positive contribution to the organizational field because they offer insight into how servant leaders can motivate employees to perform better and grow through psychological empowerment and positive affect. Organizations can benefit from developing present leaders into servant leaders and also hiring more servant leaders in critical positions. Better training, hiring, and selection procedures should be designed and communicated inside and outside of the organization (Rachmawati and Lantu, 2014). Results suggest that servant leaders are beneficial in reinforcing a culture that psychologically empowers them and promotes positive effect, which fosters more excellent performance and creativity (Rachmawati and Lantu, 2014).

According to the study of Erkutlu and Chafra (2015), the mediating role of top management support has been validated, and the impact is significantly increased under top management support. However, one key point to note here that servant leadership can also affect the overall performance of the organization because the employee may take empathy and serving the attitude of the leader casually, and instead of completing their jobs can focus on the creativity aspect only. Therefore the study findings of Parris and Peachey, (2013) suggests that servant leadership should be mediated and controlled by top management in a way that it creates a balance between daily work requirement and creativity.

Limitation

Despite take all necessary measures, there are limitations to any research study which cannot be overcome by the researcher. The researcher made all possible efforts to ensure that there are no errors in the study; however, some limitations could not be overlooked. The principal limitation for the research has been presented below;

• The first and foremost limitation of the study was a time constraint; the researcher was not able to expand the study and include additional variables in the study that could enable a better conclusion (Parris and Peachey, 2013).
• The second limitation of the study was using secondary research data only and not conducting primary research. Therefore the researcher has only concluded this study using existing studies done on the subject, which gives a good point of reference. Still, the primary research enables to test of existing research at the current point in time. The collection of primary data allows analysis to apply necessary statistical tools and conduct a hypothetical study.
• The third limitation of the study is that the research is cross-sectional and cannot be generalized to the population.

Future Research Venues

The research has been conducted using servant leadership, employee creativity, and top management support as key variables (Parris and Peachey, 2013). The findings of the study have shown a positive relationship between servant leadership and employee creativity, and mediation of top management support facilitates creativity and increases the impact of servant leadership. The research during the study has realized that servant leadership and employee creativity relationship is a pervasive research area (Kwon, 2016). Although directly, both these concepts can be explored, current literature has significant studies conducted with different variables (Rachmawati and Lantu, 2014). The present study utilized top management support as a mediating variable; there are other variables that can be explored for future research such as psychological empowerment, employee motivation, performance management, to name a few of the

important topics. Also, the researcher can be further focused on industry as well to review the leadership effectiveness between the two variables and its significance across different sectors (Kwon, 2016). Therefore the research can consider other controlling and mediating variables to enhance the research outcome, which can be more focused and can be generalized.

References

Coetzer, M.F., Bussin, M., and Geldenhuys, M., 2017. The functions of a servant leader. Administrative Sciences, 7(1), p.5.

Erkutlu, H., and Chafra, J., 2015. The effects of empowerment role identity and creative role identity on servant leadership and employees’ innovation implementation behavior. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 181, pp.3-11.

Kwon, S.J., 2016. A Study on the Influence of Servant Leadership on Followers’ Knowledge Sharing and Creativity through Affective Commitment. Knowledge Management Research, 17(1), pp.91-111.

Parris, D.L., and Peachey, J.W., 2013. A systematic literature review of servant leadership theory in organizational contexts. Journal of business ethics, 113(3), pp.377-393.

Rachmawati, A.W., and Lantu, D.C. (2014). Servant leadership theory development & measurement. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 115, pp.387-393.

Yang, J., Gu, J., and Liu, H., 2019. Servant leadership and employee creativity: The roles of psychological empowerment and work-family conflict. Current Psychology, pp.1-11.