Abstract
Servant Leadership is a holistic and moral-based leadership approach where leaders show great concern for the company’s stakeholders and engage followers in multiple dimensions, such as emotional, relational and ethical, to bring out their full potential and empower them to grow into what they are capable of becoming. Although the concept is not new among both academics and practitioners, it has received growing consideration in the last decade, due to the fact that it can positively affect a series of organizational and follower outcomes, either behavioral, performance, and attitudinal such as Employee Engagement. The purpose of this thesis is threefold: first, to depict the evolution of the scientific literature developed on the concept of Servant Leadership, identify the main criticalities and provide avenues for future research through a “Systematic Literature Network Analysis”; second, to qualitatively investigate the Servant Leadership experiences lived by junior employees and their influence on individual Engagement in a large Italian consulting firm with a strong implementation of Servant Leadership; third, to challenge the Servant Leadership approach by quantitatively exploring the emotional, social and cognitive intelligence competences of organizational leaders that are deemed particularly important to increase Engagement by subordinates working in diverse Italian organizational contexts during the Covid-19 pandemic. The main outcomes are the following. The “Systematic Literature Network Analysis” confirms that the latest trend in literature has focused on the identification of the antecedents, mediating and moderating mechanisms at the basis of the relationship between Servant Leadership and various outcomes. Among follower attitudinal outcomes, scholars identify Employee Engagement as positively influenced by Servant Leadership and of particular utility to have more emotionally involved, loyal and productive employees, providing better customer service experiences, particularly in services-oriented firms. Research emerges to be mainly quantitative, with very limited qualitative studies in the European, and particularly, in the Italian context. The qualitative investigation of the factors fueling the relationship between Servant Leadership and Employee Engagement in a typical servant-led organization allows to identify various mediators, either leader-centered, such as empowerment, team-centered, such as team cohesion, organization-centered, such as positive organizational climate, job-centered, such as challenging tasks, and employee-centered, such as proactive personality. Some factors also emerge to hinder the relationship, particularly those related to the working environment: namely, high pressure, poor work-life balance and remote-working. Finally, the quantitative exploration of leadership competences fueling Engagement required after the introduction of hybrid work highlights that leaders should particularly focus on managing both self and others’ emotions to preserve an environment of effective collaboration, leading by example and assuming the role of guidance towards the accomplishment of goal.; they should avoid, however, to be over-supportive and let the right degree of autonomy to their subordinates, to enable them to find the meaningful purpose of job by themselves. While relying on inclusivity, trust and distributed authority, the Servant Leadership approach is also characterized by a strong emotional dimension of healing and empathy, which may turn into an over-protective behavior towards followers and prevent them from being proactive within this particular scenario of crisis. Overall, it can be inferred that Servant Leadership does not fully meet subordinates’ expectations of their leaders during the pandemic of Covid-19. In the lights of the theoretical and practical implications of this research study, the main limitations are related to the adopted methodologies and to the impossibility of generalizing results to the Italian context, due to the limited samples on which it leverages. Future research might specifically address the topic of pandemic leadership by broadly and qualitatively investigating the competencies requested from leaders by their subordinates to identity the ideal combination and concordance of different leadership styles.