Peps 12379

Servant leadership, leader gender, and team gender role:
Testing a female advantage in a cascading model of performance
G. James Lemoinea (corresponding author)
jlemoine@buffalo.edu
Terry C. Blumb
Terry.Blum@ile.gatech.edu
a
University at Buffalo – State University of New York
260 Jacobs Management Center, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA 716-645-3236
b
Georgia Institute of Technology
800 W. Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30308, USA 404-894-4924
This article has been accepted for publication and undergone peer review, but has not been through
the copyediting, typesetting, pagination, and proofreading processes. As such, there may be
differences between this version and the final version of record.
This paper is based in part on G. James Lemoine’s doctoral dissertation, which was completed at the
Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Terry C. Blum. Special thanks to other
committee members Charles Parsons, Eugene Kim, Dong Liu, and Nathan Bennett. This research was
supported by the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership through the 2013 Greenleaf Scholars
award. The dissertation was also the recipient of the 2016 Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation
This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been
through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to
differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi:
10.1111/peps.12379.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Award of the International Leadership Association. An earlier version of this paper was presented at
the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in 2016, at which it was awarded the Best
Dissertation-Based Paper Award from the Organizational Behavior division. The authors thank Al
Broadbent, Pat Falotico, Hamed Ghahremani, Kerry Gibson, Emily Grijalva, Katie Huie, Wesley Kean,
Bill Kennelly, Ajay Kohli, Gamze Koseoglu, Matilda Lorenzo, Timothy Maynes, Richard Pieper, Kerry
Sauley, Paul Tesluk, Bob Thomas, Daniel Watts, and Craig Womack for their assistance and helpful
advice.
.Servant leadership, leader gender, and team gender role:
Testing a female advantage in a cascading model of performance
ABSTRACT
We integrate the theory of gender role congruity with extant research on servant leadership
to propose and test a moderated process model in which we hypothesize that servant leadership’s
effects on outcomes are stronger when implemented by women, and when it takes place within
teams high in feminine gender role composition. Specifically, we theorize that servant leadership’s
communal emphases on stakeholders and relationships align with female role prototypes, which
should lead to female advantages for job performance through the proposed serial mediators of
prosocial motivation and follower servant leadership behaviors. We test this moderated, serial-
mediation model in a temporally lagged field study with a multi-organizational sample including 109
teams. We find evidence that the mediated process model is moderated at the first stage such that
in teams higher in feminine gender role composition, servant leadership has greater direct effects on
prosocial motivation, as well as indirect effects on follower servant leadership and performance. We
do not find support for our hypothesis that a similar moderated effect would emerge for leader sex;
instead, we find that the effect of servant leadership on follower servant leadership, and
subsequently to performance, is stronger for women leaders than it is for men. The implications of
these findings for the servant leadership and role congruity literatures are discussed.

Keywords: Leadership, moral leadership, servant leadership, ethics, prosocial
motivation, gender, gender role
Servant leadership is commonly referred to as a positive team leadership model that identifies
helping and developing others as its primary concern, while sharing power (Liden, Wayne, Zhao, &
Henderson, 2008; Schaubroeck, Lam, & Peng, 2011) and “de-emphasizing glorification of the leader”
(Hale & Fields, 2007, p. 397). Traditional leadership approaches focus predominantly on
organizational goal attainment through the exercise of power, but servant leaders prioritize
communal concerns as well, caring for and developing their followers, and through them positively
impacting the organization, its external environment, and even broader society in general. A recent
review noted the large body of literature connecting servant leadership to positive outcomes and its
particularly communal nature in its attention to care and creating positive outcomes, even as
compared to other moral forms of leadership (Lemoine, Hartnell, & Leroy, 2019).
Consideration of this uniquely communal emphasis may in turn shed new light on issues of sex
and gender in leadership, which have arisen as some of the most salient contextual factors affecting
the leadership process (Eagly, 1987; Schein, 1973). Gender role congruity theory proposes that the
effectiveness of leaders may be tied to agentic and communal roles and stereotypes of followers
(Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Eagly & Karau, 2002). These implicit stereotypes rely upon prototypical
leadership behaviors generally perceived as agentic and masculine, and therefore viewed as
discordant with the more communal social roles often viewed by society as aligned with women and
femininity. Many approaches to leadership are dominated by stereotypically male and agentic
behaviors, but a servant leader’s communal aspects, including emphases on development, broad
stakeholder concern, and caring for others, instead represents a match with female stereotypes. This

suggests unique boundary conditions for servant leadership such that it may represent a meaningful
inversion to predominant “think leader, think male” paradigms (Koenig, Eagly, Mitchell, & Ristikari,
2011; Schein, 1973). More communal teams may also have greater appreciation for more sensitive
and traditionally feminine leader behaviors (Hogg et al., 2006), and members of teams more strongly
oriented towards female gender roles may react more positively to servant leadership.
Beyond its implications for questions of leadership and gender, investigation of servant
leadership’s processes and contingencies is important due to the accumulating evidence indicating
cultural shifts toward positive leadership behaviors. Organizational members prefer leaders who
value ethics and relationships, they work more effectively for those kinds of leaders, and such
leadership is essential to building both more sustainable organizations and stronger societies
(Cameron, 2008; de Luque, Washburn, Waldman, & House, 2008; Ehrhart & Klein, 2001; Luthans,
Youssef, & Avolio, 2007; Nohria & Khurana, 2010). Servant leadership has thus emerged as a
potential solution to the needs of modern organizations, and many large and high-profile firms such
as Delta and Intel have adopted this approach. Scholars and practitioners alike have long theorized
that followers of servant leaders would perform at higher levels by growing in prosocial motivation
and becoming servant leaders themselves (Greenleaf, 1977; van Dierendonck, 2011) via mechanisms
of social learning (Liden, Wayne, Liao, & Meuser, 2014; Walumbwa, Hartnell, & Oke, 2010). This
would form a cascading effect in which even employees outside of leadership roles mimic and enact
these positive leader behaviors. This assumption has not been empirically tested, however, and we
propose that it may be contingent upon the gender factors explained above.
We therefore leverage theories of gender role congruity and social learning to argue that the
serial mediation effects of a manager’s team servant leadership on a follower’s performance,
through the follower’s individual prosocial motivation and his/her own servant leadership behaviors,
are moderated by leader gender and the team’s female gender role composition. We test this

contingent, cross-level process theory providing empirical tests across 109 managers of 415
employees in six organizations. In so doing, we hope to make several contributions to the literature.
First, by integrating theories of gender congruity with servant leadership, we reveal new facets to
both, testing a reversal of the predominant agentic biases which typically provide men with an
advantage in leadership roles. This questions the predominant “think leader, think male”
stereotypes and highlights an important exception in the modern context. This contribution should
be of particular importance to women in leadership roles, as it provides a method by which they
might transcend disadvantages associated with gendered leadership prototypes. Second, we answer
calls to explicitly investigate how and when servant leadership operates (Liden, Panaccio, Meuser,
Hu, & Wayne, 2014; Peterson, Galvin, & Lange, 2012), examining whether commonly assumed
mediating mechanisms such as prosocial motivation and servant leadership contagion by followers
of servant leaders actually work as theorized. It is commonly written in the practical press that
servant leaders create followers who are servant leaders, but this assumption has not faced
empirical scrutiny. In so doing, we provide a rare test of servant leadership’s boundary conditions,
demonstrating how and why servant leadership is most likely to be effective. This attention to
possible attenuating mechanisms of popular, positive leadership styles is needed in order to attain a
more holistic and practically useful understanding of the implications of constructs such as servant
leadership (Lemoine et al., 2019). Our full cross-level moderated mediation model is illustrated in
Figure 1.
THEORY AND HYPOTHESES
Consistent with previous scholarship, we consider servant leadership as influence behaviors,
enacted humbly across relationships, which emphasize all stakeholders, including but not limited to
followers, customers, communities, and the organization itself (Greenleaf, 1977; Liden, Panaccio, et
al., 2014; Schaubroeck et al., 2011). The academic literature on servant leadership consistently

relates it to various metrics of subordinate performance and other positive outcomes (see Eva,
Robin, Sendjaya, van Dierendonck, & Liden, 2019, for a review), explaining variance beyond other
perspectives such as transformational leadership and LMX (e.g. Liden et al., 2008; van Dierendonck,
Stam, Boersma, de Windt, & Alkema, 2013). Indeed, evidence is growing that leadership focused on
developing followers and serving all stakeholders (Neubert, Hunter & Tolentino, 2016) may actually
be more effective than traditional goal-centric leadership in terms of growing organizational
performance (de Luque et al., 2008; Kiffin-Petersen, Murphy, & Soutar, 2012; Owens & Hekman,
2012). Several scholars have argued and supported their claims that servant leadership is best
considered a team-level phenomenon (e.g. Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014; Schaubroeck et al., 2011;
Walumbwa et al., 2010), involving interaction between leaders and their teams as a whole, with
every member being treated equally by the leader (Greenleaf, 1977; Hu & Liden, 2011). Servant
leadership exhibited throughout a team serves to build collective trust and efficacy, forming shared
mental models in which team members align in their views on how they see the team’s goals,
processes, and collaboration (Hu & Liden, 2011). Such leadership in effect becomes a part of the
team’s context consistently experienced by all members (Hackman, 1992), driving outcomes at
multiple levels through mechanisms such as justice climate, potency, and attention to stakeholder
interests (Ehrhart, 2004; Liden et al., 2015; Peterson et al., 2012). This team context is especially
important for one of servant leadership’s primary mechanisms, social learning, such that teams form
mediums through which examples can be modeled and motivations can contagiously and swiftly
spread (Hackman, 2002; Li, Kirkman, & Porter, 2014; Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014).
Both the practitioner-oriented and scholarly literatures on the topic suggest that servant
leadership is fundamentally a process of guiding followers to act as servant leaders themselves
(Greenleaf, 1970; Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014), modeling concern for both organizational goals and
stakeholders. A broad stakeholder focus is a key distinction from other theories of leadership and
indicates servant leadership’s primarily communal nature. By comparison, transformational and

goal-focused leadership focus foremost on organizational performance rather than the good of
followers or other stakeholders (Conger & Kanungo, 1987; Perry, Witt, Penney, & Atwater, 2010;
Stephens, D'Intino, & Victor, 1995). Other moral approaches such as ethical leadership and authentic
leadership prioritize compliance to cultural norms and moral freedom, respectively, rather than
stakeholder concern and care (Lemoine et al., 2019). Altogether, the literature suggests that servant
leadership has a uniquely strong communal focus, which in turn indicates the potential for important
differences in how and when it may affect outcomes.
Servant leadership’s contingent effect on performance
The evidence connecting servant leadership to enhanced employee job performance is
substantial at both team and individual levels (Eva et al., 2019). But in order to be useful and
predictive over a variety of potential situations, theoretical specification of moderators is necessary
to increase our understanding of whether and how servant leadership is received (c.f. Whetten,
1989). The construct’s communal emphasis suggests gender role congruity theory as a useful
perspective by which to frame such an investigation.
The positive effects of servant leadership on performance are often explained through
mechanisms such as social exchange and learning, such that followers grow in their proactive care
and concern for the organization, stakeholders, and one another (Greenleaf, 1977; Liden, Panaccio,
et al., 2014). But theory and empirics have indicated meaningful variance in receptiveness for
leadership and openness to learning from leaders (Dvir & Shamir, 2003; Meuser, Liden, Wayne, &
Henderson, 2011). Greenleaf (1998) voiced similar concerns, wondering whether "certain mindsets"
and contextual circumstances could prevent servant leaders from credibly guiding others to become
more other-minded. An essential condition of social learning is the credibility of the ‘social teacher’
(Manz & Sims, 1981), and followers are less receptive to influence from leaders whom they view as
illegitimate matches for their prototypes of what leaders should be (Hogg et al., 2006; Hogg & van

Knippenberg, 2003)
Liden and colleagues (2014) have suggested leader gender as one such potential moderator.
Gender is generally the most salient basis on which individuals categorize one another (Eagly &
Karau, 2002), but its implications for servant leadership have not been investigated. Leadership is
more effective when it is congruent with a follower's implicit perception of what leadership should
be; this increases perceived legitimacy and follower receptivity to leader influence (Liden, Panaccio,
et al., 2014; Lord, Foti, & de Vader, 1984), which is, in turn, essential for the influence processes
outlined in social learning theory. Gender role congruity theory explains the puzzling history of lower
leadership outcomes for females than males (Cohn, 2000) by suggesting that traditional leadership is
most often perceived as a masculine behavior (Bem, 1981b), and therefore teams led by female
leaders might perceive incongruence and thus experience dissonance (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Hogg et
al., 2006). At the root of this idea are the conflicting values of communion and agency, or affiliation
and harmony on one hand, and assertive struggling for power and control on the other (Bakan,
1966).
The 'traditional' gender role places communion as primarily female, and agency as primarily
male (Helgeson, 1994; Johnson, Murphy, Zewdie, & Reichard, 2008). Therefore, when women
engage in activities seen as primarily agentic, such as leadership, their followers may experience
dissonance due to the perceived gender mismatch and judge those women less favorably,
commonly known as the "think leader, think male" paradigm. This does not imply that women lead
less effectively nor even any differently than their male counterparts. The point, rather, is that the
exact same leader behaviors may be interpreted and processed differently when performed by the
two different sexes. Dissonance as women engage in leader behaviors deemed particularly
masculine (or vice-versa), can lead followers to find their team leaders less credible, which prevents
effective social learning.

Leadership has traditionally been viewed as a highly masculine and agentic activity (Brenner,
Tomkiewicz, & Schein, 1989; Schein, 1973), but servant leadership is somewhat unique in its primal
focus on caring for stakeholder needs and building relationships, which are considered more
feminine and communal activities (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Johnson et al., 2008). Leadership has
sometimes been seen as exclusively agentic, but admittedly servant leadership is not exclusively
communal because it maintains concern for organizational performance (Graham, 1991; Liden et al.,
2008). However, the relatively heavy communal weighting of servant leadership suggests that
followers led by women engaging in servant leadership behaviors would be less likely to experience
gender role incongruity dissonance, than would those led by women engaging in more or exclusively
agentic behaviors.
The match of communal leadership with a female leader should theoretically prompt others
to judge the female leader more favorably and as more credible. This perception of legitimacy, in
turn, should make them more susceptible to influence from the female servant leader. Men,
meanwhile, may struggle more with servant leadership as their followers are exposed to more
communal (and feminine) behaviors generally unexpected of the typical masculine leader
(Offermann, Kennedy, & Wirtz, 1994). This can create dissonance for males attempting to engage in
servant leadership. Eagly and Karau specifically allow for this possibility in their role congruity
theory, referencing more communal forms of leadership:
"... the role incongruity principle allows for prejudice against male leaders, to the extent
that there exist leader roles whose descriptive and injunctive content is predominantly
feminine. Because leadership is generally masculine, such leader roles are rare...." (Eagly &
Karau, 2002, p. 576)
In support of this idea, empirical research demonstrates that leaders are more likely to be
judged unfavorably and as less effective when they break these predominant implicit stereotypes

regarding leader sex (Carli, 1990; Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992). Male leaders are generally
judged on the basis of their strength alone, whereas female leaders are evaluated more positively by
members of their teams when they display more communal traits, as prominent in the servant
leadership approach (Kark, Waismel-Manor, & Shamir, 2012). These findings emerge consistently in
the literature across levels of analysis (Eagly et al., 1992; Hogg et al., 2006; Neubert & Taggar, 2004).
Altogether, this evidence suggests that women will be more effective at driving follower
performance than men when engaging in servant leadership.
Hypothesis 1: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower performance are

moderated by leader sex, such that the effect of servant leadership on follower performance is
stronger when the leaders are women rather than men.
Due to the importance of servant leader legitimacy for effective social learning (Manz &
Sims, 1981), and as suggested by role congruity theory, we also consider the composition of
feminine gender roles present on a team as an additional moderator of the effects of servant
leadership. Feminine gender role composition represents the overall extent to which members
embrace traditionally feminine (or communal) characteristics (Bem, 1977): the team’s mean level of
its members’ identification with concepts such as caring for others, personal warmth, and being
helpful. The salience of these roles is related to, but not synonymous with, biological sex (Badura,
Grijalva, Newman, Yan, & Jeon, 2018), and it is these roles rather than biological sex which serve as
conscious and subconscious heuristics by which the behaviors of others such as leaders are judged
(Bem, 1981b; Holt & Ellis, 1998; Kent & Moss, 1994).
Scholars have frequently argued that gender roles and orientations influence and manifest
not just within individuals, but also in teams and organizations, such as in cultural dimensions of
masculinity/femininity (Acker, 1990; Hofstede, 1980; Kanter, 1975). Such team-level compositions of
individual differences form “characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting” (Bell, 2007; p.

597) which impact how teams work interdependently, develop expectations, and respond to team
phenomena such as leadership (e.g. Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998; Gonzalez-Mulé,
DeGeest, McCormick, Seong, & Brown, 2014). When leadership is collective and focused on teams as
a whole (as is the case for servant leadership: Greenleaf, 1977; Schaubroeck et al., 2011), team-level
constructs offer the greatest potential for assessing a supervisor’s match with the environment in
which they lead. Examination of any single member’s alignment cannot “provide a sufficient basis
from which to understand the influence process between leaders and team members en bloc” (Cole,
Carter, & Zhang, 2013, p.: 963) and servant leadership’s collective enactment to followers suggests
the importance of team receptivity (Hu & Liden, 2011; Schaubroeck et al., 2011).
This suggests that a servant leader’s credibility may largely depend on whether the team
judges communal care and concern for others to be important and appropriate components of
leadership (Cole et al., 2013; Greenleaf, 1996; Hollander, 1992). Alignment of communal servant
leadership with team feminine (and communal) gender role composition suggests impressions of
legitimacy and credibility by followers, as expressed leadership matches their impressions of what
leadership can and should include. This, in turn, enables more effective social learning. Teams lower
in feminine gender role composition are more likely to judge a servant leader’s communal focus as
inappropriate and ineffective, hindering their response and limiting the leader’s effectiveness. In
support of these arguments, Hogg and colleagues (Hogg et al., 2006; Hogg, Hains, & Mason, 1998)
have similarly demonstrated that work groups develop collective prototypes of the ideal leader,
based on their collective composition of characteristics such as gendered norms, which form a lens
through which followers judge leader credibility. Altogether, this evidence suggests that members of
teams high in feminine gender role will be most receptive to servant leadership and experience
stronger effects on performance.

Hypothesis 2: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower performance are
moderated by team feminine gender role composition, such that the effects are stronger when
teams have higher compositions of feminine gender roles than for teams with lower
compositions of feminine gender roles.
Prosocial motivation as a mediating mechanism
We next turn our attention to a process model through which servant leaders impact the
performance of their followers, focusing first on prosocial motivation, a frequently theorized but less
tested outcome of servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977; Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014). Prosocial
motivation can be understood as a desire to cooperate with colleagues to attain mutually beneficial
outcomes, and to benefit customers or other stakeholders. It has state-like aspects, and is
susceptible to change due to environmental phenomena such as leadership (Bolino & Grant, 2016;
Grant & Berry, 2011). Concurrent with the social learning perspective, repeated exposure to and
rewards for behaviors which benefit others, especially when modeled by respected individuals in
team leadership roles, tends to lead followers to consider those behaviors themselves (Berkowitz,
1970; Krebs, 1970). Leader activities focused on stakeholder good have been demonstrated to be
particularly influential for growing the other-oriented motivations of followers (Grant & Berg, 2012;
Lemoine et al., 2019).
This occurs through social learning processes of observing, imitating, and modeling which as
we have discussed are common mechanisms of servant leadership (Bandura, 1977; Liden et al.,
2008). Servant leaders encourage the members of their teams to consider and engage in behaviors
which benefit others (Graham, 1991). This in turn generates positive affect and feelings of well-being
in those members, especially in those for whom such behaviors would normally be novel (Batson &
Shaw, 1991; Buchanan & Bardi, 2010). This occurs as individuals realize their own relative good
standing, as they foster a more positive perception of others, and as this helping leads them to

foster deeper and more positive relationships with others (Trivers, 1971). This positive affect, in
turn, builds the attractiveness of other-centric actions, and acts as feedback which is considered as
followers adjust and align their goals and orientations with their desired outcomes (Bolino, Harvey,
& Bachrach, 2012; Gollwitzer, 1990).
Hypothesis 3: Servant leadership is positively related to follower prosocial motivation.
We propose that the contextual elements of leader sex and team feminine gender role
composition moderate this relationship between team servant leadership and individual follower
prosocial motivation much as we hypothesized with servant leadership’s impact on employees’
performance. The rationale for these effects are quite similar to the logic presented for the first two
hypotheses. As suggested by theories of gender role congruity (Eagly & Karau, 2002) and implicit
leadership perspectives (Lord et al., 1984), leader matches to follower stereotypes and prototypes of
what a leader ‘should’ be impact the perceived credibility and legitimacy of the leader. These effects
should apply broadly to servant leadership’s effects on followers, but the predictions of role
congruity theory should apply particularly strongly to its impact on prosocial motivation. A
performance outcome might result from simple reciprocation or due to the servant leader providing
extra resources to followers, but emulating and modeling that leader’s prosocial motivation requires
perceived legitimacy. This credibility is directly tied to implicit leadership stereotypes and team
gender congruity matches, without which social learning is suppressed.
As discussed earlier, gender role congruity theory suggests that followers will be most
susceptible to a servant leader’s influence (a) when that leader is female, and (b) when the recipient
team has a high composition of feminine gender role. The prominent communal aspects of servant
leadership, including putting others first and creating value for communities (Liden et al., 2008) align
with perceptions of the female sex and predominately female roles (Eagly & Karau, 2002), which
should create meaningful boundaries along these lines as to the servant leader’s ability to influence

followers’ prosocial motivation.
Hypothesis 4: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower prosocial motivation
are moderated by leader sex, such that the effects of servant leadership on follower prosocial
motivation are stronger when the leaders are women rather than men.
Hypothesis 5: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower prosocial motivation
are moderated by team feminine gender role composition, such that the effects are stronger
when teams have a higher rather than lower level of feminine gender role.
Follower servant leadership and performance
The enactment of servant leadership behaviors by organization members who are
themselves led by servant leaders, is perhaps the most crucial to classic understandings of servant
leadership (Greenleaf, 1970), as well as to scholars, practitioners, and the Greenleaf Center for
Servant Leadership itself (Falotico, 2014; Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014). This cascading of servant
leadership behaviors across organizational levels is prevalent for other positive leadership
approaches (Mayer, Kuenzi, Greenbaum, Bardes, & Salvador, 2009), and is particularly relevant for
discussions of servant leadership as it was foreshadowed by the earliest writings on the topic:
"Discriminating and determined servants as followers are as important as servant-leaders, and
everyone, from time to time, may be in both roles” (Greenleaf, 1970; p. 18). Greenleaf proposed
servant leadership as a system in which all of a servant leader’s subordinates grow in both
motivation and ability to become servant leaders themselves. These emphases on follower ethical
development and empowerment have remained prevalent in modern models of servant leadership
(van Dierendonck, 2011). Cascading links have never been tested in academic scholarship, although
promising research indicates that servant leadership does create servant cultures (Liden, Wayne, et
al., 2014).

A follower’s prosocial motivation is a likely mediator of this process, as it drives prosocial
behaviors, and those behaviors are expected to manifest frequently in the culture built by the
servant leader, creating norms and rewards for these types of behaviors among organization
members (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003; Peterson et al., 2012). Followers motivated to help others are
more likely to engage in many servant leadership behaviors, such as acting in accordance with
stakeholder good, developing and cooperating with others, and sharing power (Grant, 2008; Liden,
Panaccio, et al., 2014). Although the previous hypotheses were theorized at the team level, prosocial
motivation and follower servant leadership are both individual-level variables, and as such this effect
might feasibly exist at both levels. Individuals within teams who have higher prosocial motivation
than their teammates might exhibit relatively more servant leadership, whereas teams high in
prosocial motivation could collectively exhibit more servant leadership than teams lower in prosocial
motivation. Altogether, prosocial motivation is a mechanism through which servant leadership
behaviors should be somewhat contagious.
Hypothesis 6: Prosocial motivation is positively related to servant leadership behavior enacted

by followers.
Although there is precedent to theorize that proximal outcomes of servant leadership such
as prosocial motivation might directly predict performance (Meglino & Korsgaard, 2004), we
propose that in a servant leadership context, such performance increments might be mediated by
the manifestation of follower servant leadership behaviors as discussed above, forming a three-
stage chain. If servant leadership predicts performance due to mechanisms such as social learning
and trust (Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014; Schaubroeck et al., 2011), it is logical to extend these
arguments to individuals who are not hierarchical leaders as well. If followers practice the same
servant leadership behaviors among each other (and, presumably, toward other teams and
customers), they could similarly benefit by sharing information and resources, learning from one

another, and building relationships. Individuals who practice high levels of servant leadership
behaviors would be expected to regularly engage in helpful citizenship, share power and ideas, and
develop strong ties with other individuals within the organization (Graham, 1991; Liden et al., 2008;
van Dierendonck, 2011), all of which contribute to high task performance (Balkundi & Harrison,
2006; Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009). Additionally, the literature on teams with multiple
leaders indicates that such ‘shared leadership’ has substantial benefits for performance due to
enhanced efficiency and coordination generated by stronger relationships and information-sharing
(Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007; Wang, Waldman, & Zhang, 2014).
These literatures provide evidence that servant leadership by organizational members might
affect their job performance at both the team and individual levels, and as such we hypothesize
broadly:
Hypothesis 7: Follower servant leadership is positively related to job performance.
Altogether, these hypotheses suggest a three-step and cross-level contingent process model
of servant leadership’s effects on performance, as illustrated in Figure 1. The effect of team
supervisor servant leadership on follower prosocial motivation should be moderated by leader sex
and the team’s feminine gender role composition. The path from this proximal mediator to
performance first runs through the manifestation of the follower’s own servant leadership
behaviors. This indicates our final hypotheses of conditional indirect effects:
Hypothesis 8a: The positive relationship between supervisor servant leadership and follower
performance is serially mediated by prosocial motivation and follower servant leadership
behaviors. This mediated relationship is moderated at the first stage by leader gender, such
that the relationship is stronger when leaders are female rather than male.
Hypothesis 8b:The positive relationship between supervisor servant leadership and

performance is serially mediated by prosocial motivation and follower servant leadership

behaviors. This mediated relationship is moderated at the first stage by team feminine gender
role composition, such that the relationship is stronger when teams have higher compositions
of feminine gender role.
METHODS
We tested this model by studying employees and managers of six organizations
headquartered in the eastern United States. The organizations in the sample included two global
financial services firms, from which several large departments participated (Organizations 1-2); a
small document services corporation (Org. 3); two relatively smaller not-for-profit organizations
specializing in community services (Orgs. 4-5); and several departments within the business school of
a large university (Org. 6). Before data collection began, we conducted approximately 40 hours of
qualitative interviews with employees and managers to gather more information about the context
and gauge the appropriateness of survey instruments. These interviews revealed that work in these
teams was highly interdependent, owing to either the nature of the work done by the departments
surveyed (in Orgs. 1-2, 6), or to the small overall size of the organization (in Orgs. 3-5). Whereas
there were differences in the mean levels of measures across organizations, the covariance between
them was quite stable, indicating a similar general pattern of relationships across organizations.
We collected data from participants in multiple waves in order to minimize common method
biases (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003) and reduce any feelings of "survey fatigue." In
all sites but one, employees completed two surveys spaced approximately three weeks apart with
the first containing control, independent, and moderating variables, and the second containing the
mediators. Approximately one week later, managers rated their employees on their performance
and servant leadership. Multiple waves of employee surveys were not possible in Organization 1 due
to limited availability of employees; therefore, in this sample employees completed one survey and
their managers completed another, approximately three weeks later. In this manner, we sought to

minimize the risk of common method bias where possible, although interaction effects such as the
ones central to our model are highly unlikely to result from common method variance (Siemsen,
Roth, & Oliveira, 2010).
The response rate for the Time 1 survey was 46% for employees in Organization 1, 83% in
Organization 2, 89% in Organization 3, 94% for Organization 4, 87% in Organization 5, and 79% for
Organization 6. The response rate for the second survey wave three weeks later was mostly
consistent across the organizations, ranging from 82-85% (with most attrition being from employees
leaving the organizations). For the manager ratings, we obtained 51% manager participation in
Organization 1, 92% in Organization 2, 96% in Organization 3, and 100% participation in
Organizations 4-6. The final total sample for this study included 415 employees matched with 109
managers. Missing data analyses, comparing the organizational samples to the demographics of the
potential total samples, and logistic regression checks following the method of Goodman and Blum
(1996), all suggested that missing data was at random and did not bias results. Sixty-one percent of
the employees surveyed were female, and 39% of the managers surveyed were female. The final
sample was 67% Caucasian and 8% African-American, and had 4.1 years of working experience with
the organization on average.
Measures
Except where otherwise noted, all responses were made on a 1-to-7 Likert scale, with 1
representing "Strongly disagree" and 7 representing "Strongly agree."
Servant leadership of managers and followers (alpha = .97 for managers, .81 for followers).
We measured manager servant leadership with the full 28-item scale by Liden and colleagues (2008),
as the most prominent and validated scale in the literature. Managers were rated by their followers
at Time 1, and these scores were aggregated to the team level. For the mediating variable of

follower servant leadership, managers rated each of their followers’ servant leadership behaviors
during the last wave. In order to minimize rating time and attrition concerns about managers with
multiple followers, managers rated each follower using the 7-item version of the servant leadership
scale (Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014; Liden et al., 2015), adapted to reference employees rather than
formal leaders. In the cited studies, the short scale was correlated with the full 28-item version at .95
to .97. In this research, it correlated with the full scale for the ratings of managers at .97,
demonstrating its validity. Sample items include “My leader makes my career development a
priority” and (for follower servant leadership) “This employee puts the best interests of others ahead
of his/her own.”
Manager sex. The manager’s sex, a team-level variable as all team members had the same
manager, was measured by self-report of the manager. The managers’ sex was dummy-coded as 0
for men and 1 for women.
Team feminine gender role composition (alpha=.91). Consistent with other compositional
team characteristics (Bell, 2007; Cronin, Weingart, & Todorova, 2011), we operationalized this
variable as the team’s mean score of feminine gender roles, representing the degree to which this
orientation is dominant and salient within the team. This moderating variable was measured via the
10 words associated with feminine gender roles using the short-form of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory
(Bem, 1981a). Participants rated how much each word (such as “compassionate” and “warm”) was
representative of themselves with 1=never or almost never true to 7=almost always true. This
variable was converted to a proportion out of a total possible score, ranging from 0 to 1, and
aggregated to the team level.
Prosocial motivation (alpha=.90). Followers rated themselves using the five-item prosocial
motivation scale (sample item: "I like to work on tasks that have the potential to benefit others";
Grant & Sumanth, 2009).

Job performance (alpha=.91). Managers rated their followers on job performance with
seven items by Williams & Anderson (sample item: "This employee adequately completes assigned
duties"; 1991).
Control variables. We controlled in all analyses for the follower's own sex and his or her
tenure with the organization and manager, as these could conceivably affect perceptions of several
of our study variables (i.e. Clary et al., 1998; Eagly & Johnson, 1990). We also controlled for team
size, as this may impact both the degree to which a manager can engage in servant leadership and
their follower ratings (e.g. Wheelan, 2009), and for membership in the various organizations using
dummy codes representing membership in Organizations 2-6. Rerunning our analyses without these
controls did not change the significance of hypothesized coefficients (Bernerth & Aguinis, 2016).
Preliminary Analyses
We conducted two sets of single-level confirmatory factor analyses of the employee- and
supervisor-rated variables, accounting for the clustered nature of the data with Mplus’s
‘type=COMPLEX’ command, to ensure that they were all distinct and that items did not load onto
constructs other than those intended. First, we examined the hypothesized model in which the three
follower-rated variables – manager servant leadership (a higher-order construct composed of its
seven dimensions), team feminine gender role composition, and prosocial motivation – loaded onto
three separate but correlated latent constructs. Tests of chi-square differences suggested that this
model (χ2df = 850 =1875.58; CFI=.92; TLI=.91; RMSEA=.05; SRMR=.05) had superior fit as compared to
models in which prosocial motivation and servant leadership loaded onto a single factor (χ2df = 859 =
4367.78; CFI=.73; TLI=.71; RMSEA=.10; SRMR=.10), in which prosocial motivation and feminine
gender role composition loaded onto the same factor (χ2df = 852 = 2643.34; CFI=.86; TLI=.85;
RMSEA=.07; SRMR=.08), and in which all three follower-rated variables loaded onto the same factor
(χ2df = 860 = 6303.92; CFI=.57; TLI=.55; RMSEA=.12; SRMR=.15). For supervisor-rated variables, the

model in which follower servant leadership and job performance loaded onto separate factors (χ2df =
76 = 243.09; CFI=.88; TLI=.85; RMSEA=.08; SRMR=.06) fit the data significantly better than the model
in which they both loaded to the same factor (χ2df = 77 = 392.51; CFI=.77; TLI=.73; RMSEA=.10;
SRMR=.08). Although within-team agreement is not necessary for a team compositional variable to
be valid and meaningful (Cronin et al., 2011), we nonetheless assessed agreement in team feminine
gender role composition alongside team servant leadership. We examined their mean rwg scores
assuming moderate skews, a conservative test suggested by the possibility for leniency or positivity
biases for these constructs (LeBreton & Senter, 2008). The values for follower-reported servant
leadership and feminine gender role composition, which were hypothesized at the team level, were
.91 and .79, respectively, and the ICC1s for these variables were .51 and .33. The ICCs for the other
main variables were .30 for prosocial motivation, .26 for follower servant leadership, and .18 for job
performance.
Analytical Strategy
So as to properly account for effects and error terms at different levels of analysis, we
adapted the multilevel modeling procedures devised by Preacher and colleagues (Preacher, 2015;
Preacher, Zhang, & Zyphur, 2016; Zhang, Zyphur, & Preacher, 2009) in Mplus to form a moderated
‘2-1-1-1’ model. This technique is especially important when cluster sizes are small, as they are in
this study. Preacher and colleagues’ (2006) online tools were used to examine regions of significance
for interactions (Gardner, Harris, Li, Kirkman, & Mathieu, 2017). Tests of individual main and
moderated effects (H1-H7) were first tested individually, and then combined for tests of H8a-b. In
the first set of tests, the first five hypotheses were examined at the team level (while controlling for
any effects at the individual level as well), and the tests of H6-H7 were tested at both levels, aligned
with the proposed levels of each hypothesis. Hypotheses 8a & 8b, which represented full three-stage
moderated mediation process models, were analyzed with a clustered path modeling framework in

which all component relationships of each hypothesis were modeled simultaneously, with
asymmetric confidence intervals for measuring the overall conditional indirect effects, which has
been found to be most appropriate for such tests (Hayes, 2013; Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007).
For these analyses, following the guidance of Preacher & colleagues (2010), we modeled all variables
at both levels but used only the team level coefficients to generate indirect effects, as such effects
can only be transmitted through the team level in a 2-1-1-1 model. We modeled all control variables
and all ‘downstream’ variables, such that variables and interactions in prior stages of the model
were controlled in subsequent stages. Because standard multilevel path modeling does not allow
asymmetric confidence intervals, we generated them with a Bayesian analysis using maximum
likelihood parameter results as starting values (Muthén & Muthén, 2016).
RESULTS
Tables 1 and 2 depict the correlations among study variables and the results of our first set
of hypotheses, respectively. We proposed that servant leadership’s impacts on job performance
would be moderated by manager sex (H1) and team feminine gender role composition (H2). Neither
hypothesis was supported as the coefficients for the direct interactions on performance failed to
reach significance. The subsequent hypotheses tested the steps of the theorized process model of
these interactions through prosocial motivation and follower servant leadership. We expected that
manager servant leadership would impact employee prosocial motivation (H3) and that this
relationship would be moderated by leader sex (H4), but neither of these predictions were
supported in the data.
Hypothesis 5, however, was fully supported, as the interaction of servant leadership and
team feminine gender role composition on prosocial motivation was significant (H5:  = .91, p < .05).
The plot of this interaction, shown in Figure 2, indicates an alignment with our prediction. Whereas
followers on teams with higher feminine gender role composition experienced a positive effect of

servant leadership on prosocial motivation ( = .11, p < .01), followers on teams with low feminine
gender role composition were not significantly impacted by servant leadership ( = -.05, p > .05). A
test of regions of significance revealed that the effects of servant leadership on prosocial motivation
were positive when teams had feminine role scores above approximately 76% (or above 5.56 on a 7-
point scale), negative when their scores were below 24%, (or 2.44 on a 7-point scale), and
nonsignificant between those two values.
Hypotheses 6 and 7 continued the process model by connecting prosocial motivation to job
performance across two steps, and both received support. Prosocial motivation exhibited a positive
effect on follower servant leadership at the team level (H6:  = .32, p < .05) but not the individual-
level, suggesting that the emergence of follower servant leadership may exclusively be a team-level
phenomenon. Follower servant leadership in turn predicted performance at both levels (H7:
individual: β = .61, p < .01; team:  = .44, p < .01). The team effects for these two links were
especially promising as our proposed serial indirect effect would exist exclusively at the team level.
Altogether, the support for H5-7 provided preliminary evidence for the moderated mediation effect
of servant leadership and team feminine gender role composition on job performance, but to more
rigorously test Hypothesis 8, we ran each full process model simultaneously (illustrated in Figure 3
with indirect effects listed in Table 3).
Given the lack of support for H4 proposing an interaction of servant leadership and manager
sex affecting team prosocial motivation, we did not expect Hypothesis 8a, the moderated mediation
starting with this first-stage interaction, to achieve significance. As expected, the first-stage
interaction was not significant in this model ( = .09, p > .05). However, in reviewing results from the
full model we noticed that the non-hypothesized interaction of servant leadership and leader gender
instead emerged directly (rather than indirectly through prosocial motivation) on follower servant
leadership ( = .38, p < .05). This suggests that female servant leaders are more effective at driving

the servant leadership of their followers than their male counterparts (this interaction is graphed in
Figure 4). The confidence intervals for the non-hypothesized conditional indirect effect of servant
leadership showed that the relationship was positive and significant when the servant leader was a
woman (.33, CI: [.125, .585]), but not when the servant leader was a man (.15, CI: [-.003, .298]). This
does not support our hypothesis that the interaction of leader sex and servant leadership would
affect subordinate servant leadership through prosocial motivation, but instead provides evidence
for a different female efficacy advantage in servant leadership, as we will explore in the following
section.
Hypothesis 8b, on the other hand, which suggested a four-stage process beginning with the
interaction of servant leadership and team feminine gender role composition, was supported as
proposed, as shown in Figure 3. When modeled simultaneously, all path coefficients were
significant: the interaction predicting prosocial motivation ( = 1.04, p < .05), prosocial motivation
predicting follower servant leadership (β = .34, p < .01), and follower servant leadership predicting
performance (β = .51, p < .01). The conditional indirect effect of servant leadership was significant
when team feminine role composition was high (.17, CI: [.015, .471]), but became negative when it
was low (-.15, CI: [-.424, -.009]).
Finally, in our hypotheses we specifically proposed relationships based on leader sex and
team feminine gender roles based on role congruity theory. In a post-hoc analysis, we also tested
the alternate predictions that leader gender role and/or follower sex (at the individual level, or as
team composition) might similarly interact with servant leadership to predict outcomes. None of
these interactions attained significance at either level. Additionally, analysis of three-way
interactions adding leader gender to interactions of team feminine gender role composition and
servant leadership, and adding follower sex to interactions of leader sex and servant leadership,
provided no significant results.

DISCUSSION
Our findings as a whole support our propositions derived from role congruity theory that
manager sex and team gender role composition would have important implications for the
effectiveness of servant leadership, although our findings in regard to the path of manager sex were
unexpected. The two factors impacted servant leadership in distinct manners, such that only team
feminine roles moderated servant leadership’s impact on prosocial motivation to kick off the full
process model. Through prosocial motivation, followers led by servant leaders exhibited servant
leadership behaviors themselves, which in turn led to higher job performance. Tests of the entire
contingent process model provided support for the team feminine role contingency, such that
members of teams with higher compositions of feminine gender roles responded to manager
servant leadership by growing in prosocial motivation, with higher levels of their own servant leader
behaviors, and subsequently enjoying stronger performance. We found that leader sex, on the other
hand, only impacted servant leadership’s effect on performance through follower servant
leadership, rather than through our proposed mediation chain. As an unhypothesized effect,
replication would be desirable to enhance confidence in the results, but on its own this suggests that
female managers engaging in servant leadership behaviors have a significant advantage in affecting
performance through the servant leadership behaviors of their employees.
Overall, these results provide meaningful support for the integration of role congruity theory
with servant leadership, as well as Greenleaf’s (1970) original but untested proposal that servant
leaders would impact performance through inspiring and enabling their followers to become servant
leaders themselves. The temporally lagged nature of this study is worthy of note, in that much of the
servant leadership research to date has been cross-sectional (see Walumbwa et al., 2010, for an
exception). By testing new and practically meaningful mediators and boundary conditions of servant
leadership, this research builds our understanding of why, how, and when servant leadership works,

in accordance with the basic guidelines of conceptual understanding and theory (Whetten, 1989).
The integration of role congruity theory with the servant leadership approach identifies a
feminine leadership advantage that has seldom emerged in the literature. Sex is often considered
one of the most salient factors determining leadership emergence (Kent & Moss, 1994; Schein,
1973), with men more likely to emerge as leaders due to implicit "think leader, think male"
masculine leader stereotypes (Bem, 1981b; Eagly et al., 1992; Schein, 1973). As part of their gender
role congruity theory, Eagly and Karau (2002) specifically raised the possibility that women might
hold advantages for any less masculine forms of leadership, forms more communal in nature,
although they called any such approaches "rare". This study provides some evidence supporting that
advantage. Although not exclusively communal, servant leadership displays a relative emphasis on
communion (through putting followers first and a stakeholder focus) unseen in most traditional
forms of leadership (Lemoine et al., 2019) and provides a model by which female and communal
gender stereotypes more closely align. Meta-analytic evidence shows that women hold a perceptual
disadvantage when exhibiting most leadership behaviors (Eagly et al., 1992), but we reveal an
important exception to this rule. A next step in this research might be to further explore the broader
approach used by Johnson and colleagues (2008) in examining the impacts of leader sex and
follower gender role on specific leader behaviors, from task-oriented planning and monitoring to
more relation-oriented recognizing and developing employees (Yukl, 2012).
Beyond the reversal of the ‘think leader, think male’ prototype and the confirmation of
Greenleaf’s (1977) original theory of servant leadership contagion, perhaps one of the most
interesting aspects of this study is the differential impact of various gender-related factors. The sex
of the servant leader did not determine effectiveness at driving prosocial motivation or performance
as expected, but analyses instead indicated that women were more effective than men at using
servant leadership to create follower servant leaders. Although this unhypothesized result must be

interpreted with caution, gender role congruity theory provides a potential explanation for it.
Specifically, servant leadership’s communal nature implies that women rather than men might serve
as its most credible ambassadors and role-models, due to our implicit matches of women with
communion and men with more agentic pursuits (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). In hindsight, it is clear that
theory on gender roles predicts a stronger female advantage for communal behavioral outcomes
such as follower servant leadership than agentic outcomes such as performance. This does not
suggest that men cannot spark servant leadership in their followers, any more than classical
leadership research results have indicated that women were unsuited to traditional types of
leadership. Rather, even though men and women exhibit similar levels of servant leadership
behaviors as indicated by the insignificant coefficient between sex and servant leadership, it seems
that women may have a distinct advantage when using this approach due to implicit gender
stereotypes (Eagly & Karau, 2002) and servant leadership’s communal focus. Further, an alternative
ontology of leadership for understanding outcomes of direction, alignment and commitment, which
subsumes but goes beyond the usual tripod of leaders, followers and goals (Drath et. al, 2008) in
leadership studies allows for theorizing about the importance of servant leadership’s contextual
climate and culture in this arena. Future research may specify the web of beliefs and practices, or
leadership culture, that go beyond gender role composition and leader sex.
Social learning theory provides an interesting counter-argument, however, which may help
to explain the lack of a moderated mediation for leader sex and prosocial motivation. Specifically,
social learning processes become stronger and more effective as behaviors are perceived as more
unexpected and unique (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1981). With this in mind, it is possible that a male
servant leader would actually make for a stronger social learning model, as a male servant leader
engaging in stereotypical female and communal activities such as "emotional healing" and putting
others first (Liden et al., 2008) might be seen as more unexpected than if those same behaviors

emerged from a female manager. Thus within the agency-communion perspective, although role
congruity theory supports the female manager as having the servant leadership advantage, social
learning theory suggests other processes for the male manager. Contrary to most studies of sex
differences in leadership (Eagly et al., 1992), though, we found no relative advantages for male
servant leaders at any stage of the leadership process. This again provides evidence for servant
leadership’s particularly communal nature (Lemoine et al., 2019) and suggests a need for further
research investigating how this phenomena operates in practice. The wealth of research on servant
leadership’s mediators reveals many potential paths to success, and our research cannot conclude
whether leader sex is important for any of these paths other than the specific ones measured here.
This suggests a theoretical need to identify what mechanisms are and are not affected by leader sex,
examining mediators such as employee trust (e.g. Hu & Liden, 2011; Schaubroeck et al., 2011) or
team climate (e.g. Ehrhart, 2004; Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014). Other questions are also suggested: for
instance, might occupation and industry, and their respective gender compositions, influence the
outcomes of servant leadership? Does the impact of male and female servant leaders on direction,
alignment and commitment naturally work through different mechanisms, or do they more
efficiently influence behavioral outcomes of teams with different gender roles though different
mechanisms?
Although this study is far from the first to propose (Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014; Russell &
Stone, 2002) nor use (Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014; Walumbwa et al., 2010) a social learning
perspective to understand servant leadership's outcomes, we contribute to the literature by
demonstrating new avenues by which it may operate. Mechanisms such as trust and reciprocity are
commonly cited in leadership research (Dirks, 2000; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995), and undoubtedly play
a role in servant leadership processes, but do not speak to the fundamental transformation of
individuals' motives and abilities suggested by servant leadership theory. It is feasible that such

servant leadership development takes place over significant periods of time (Bandura, 1977) and
through feedback loops (Drath et al., 2008), so mechanisms such as trust and social exchange may
serve as initial or parallel processes by which servant leaders impact outcomes. Future studies
should consider modeling relationships which contain multiple mechanisms simultaneously, so as to
better understand how these mechanisms might work together, vary sequentially, or even interact
with one another.
Prosocial motivation has been theorized as a likely mechanism of servant leadership (Liden,
Panaccio, et al., 2014; Liden et al., 2008), but according to a recent review (Lemoine et al., 2019) it
has not been empirically tested. Prosocial motivation’s precipitation of follower servant leadership is
a promising finding, because enactment of servant leadership behaviors by followers is arguably the
primary and fundamental theoretical outcome of this form of leadership (Greenleaf, 1977, 1996;
Liden, Panaccio, et al., 2014). To our knowledge, this research serves as the first empirical test of this
longstanding prediction, answering several calls from leadership scholars (Liden et al., 2008; Spears,
2002; van Dierendonck, 2011) and matching findings of similar cascading effects for other positive
and negative leadership approaches (Liu, Liao, & Loi, 2012; Mayer et al., 2009). This finding of
cascading servant leadership is an important development in this field, in that it speaks to the long-
term sustainability of the servant-as-leader approach, provides support for the conceptual roots of
the construct, and opens promising new lines of research inquiry as to how servant leadership aligns
with leader development.
However, this result must be interpreted cautiously and with consideration of the
moderation of team feminine gender role composition. It is noteworthy that the theorized chain of
followers becoming prosocially motivated, engaging in servant leadership themselves, and
consequently experiencing higher performance was only positive when their teams had high
feminine gender role compositions. In a way, this may indicate ‘the rich getting richer,’ as members

of teams high in feminine gender roles would be expected to have higher prosocial motivation.
Teams low in feminine gender role composition experienced no impact on prosocial motivation,
indicating the possibility that they experienced dissonance from what they may have viewed as
unexpected and inappropriate communal leadership, which in turn might cause withdrawal and a
reduced effect of the servant leader’s communal outreach. Results from H8b suggested performance
implications of this in that the conditional indirect effect of servant leadership on performance was
significant and negative for groups low in feminine gender role. This suggests that some groups may
be ill-suited to servant leadership and might even actively resist it. This seems an important
contingency on the positive effects of servant leadership, requiring further investigation. Social
learning theory suggests that it is plausible, for instance, that servant leaders could overcome this
resistance given time. More research on the communal match between servant leaders and
subordinates is needed to verify and identify contingencies, in order to more accurately craft our
theory of how servant leadership works. Regardless, these findings support the tenants of theory on
role congruity and leader-team congruence (Cole et al., 2013; Eagly & Karau, 2002).
This research also suggests the potential for integration with theories of distributed and
shared leadership (Carson et al., 2007) and complexity theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2011). Related
questions left unanswered by this research include how such leader development processes may
play out over time, and whether other leadership competencies are developed alongside servant
leadership (Dragoni, Tesluk, Russell, & Oh, 2009). As empowerment is a fundamental operational
element of servant leadership (Ehrhart, 2004; Liden et al., 2008) and precursor to employee
engagement (Spreitzer, 1995), these results suggest the possibility of shared leadership team
processes within groups led by servant leaders. Over time, additional positive effects on
performance and other outcome variables might appear as leadership emerged from multiple
sources. If the hierarchical manager empowers the development of leader identities among others

on her team who had become servant leaders, what impact would this have on the outcomes and
processes of leadership? To what extent might sex and gender roles of managers and employees
influence these relationships?
These results provide practical guidance for organizations hoping to install people-oriented,
moral, and stakeholder-driven models of leadership within their management teams.
First and foremost, this study adds to a growing body of evidence that servant leadership, despite its
lack of primary and proximal focus on agentic goals, mission, and profits, nonetheless has
meaningful positive effects on agentic goals, mission, and performance (Liden, Wayne, et al., 2014;
Peterson et al., 2012; Schaubroeck et al., 2011). Beyond these results, this research also suggests
several other outcomes of potential interest to organizations. Servant leadership can grow employee
prosocial motivation in the right contexts, which may in turn grow organizational citizenship and
proactivity (Grant, 2008; Rioux & Penner, 2001). And if servant leaders truly are capable of creating
more servant leaders from their employees, the other benefits mentioned here improve
exponentially as servant leadership emerges from multiple sources, as teams become more
proactive, engaged, and supportive. This has important ramifications for resource use in areas such
as leadership training and development, and succession planning efforts.
Servant leadership was ineffective, however, at growing prosocial motivation when those
teams had low communal and feminine gender role composition, and was less effective at impacting
follower servant leadership when the managers were men. Altogether, this suggests contingencies
on servant leadership’s effectiveness which need to be understood, particularly in certain contexts.
In heavily masculine contexts, for instance, such as some forms of blue-collar work in which most
managers might be male and most employees may have more traditionally masculine roles, would
servant leadership be helpful or harmful on balance? The wealth of research on servant leadership’s
positive outcomes may seem to suggest that it could be universally applied, but we recommend a

more cautious approach, with consideration of alignment between leaders and their teams (Cole et
al., 2013). It may well be that servant leadership is nonetheless helpful in such environments –
especially over longer periods of time – but this research does at least indicate that servant
leadership would be less powerful in such contexts than it would be in others.
Female managers may find the most useful practical implications in this study, as our results
suggest that servant leadership is an ideal leadership style for women to use in order to minimize
and even invert the typically negative effects of agentic masculine leadership stereotypes and
associated cognitive dissonance. These findings suggest that modern organizations, especially those
in more female-dominated and communal industries, should consider training new managers and
even employees on servant leadership practices. Although there is certainly not a one-size-fits-all
solution to leadership, even for a gender group, women who in the past have struggled to match
more masculine and agentic approaches and expectations of leadership (Eagly & Karau, 2002) may
find servant leadership a more palatable and effective approach – this should be considered for
leadership development programs targeted at women. The feminine gender role findings may
suggest the usefulness of servant leadership particularly for teams in communal industries
characterized by helping and service, such as healthcare and education.
Although this study has many strengths such as its temporally lagged nature and multi-
organizational framework, it is not without its limitations. First, it is important to note again that in a
model such as ours, all indirect effects exist solely at the team-level of analysis (Preacher et al.,
2010). This research was temporally lagged, but this is not sufficient to determine causality nor rule
out reciprocal effects. Whereas these results provide some evidence, for instance, that servant
leadership can precipitate prosocial motivation in some situations, it is also feasible that the causal
arrow works in the opposite direction. That is, managers might be spurred to the relationship-
building and empowerment of servant leadership through their employees' high prosocial

motivation, or servant leaders might purposely select employees already high in this construct as
would be suggested by an attraction-selection-attrition framework (Ployhart, Weekley, & Baughman,
2006).
This study was temporally lagged in that manager-ratings of outcomes were rated after
employee-ratings of leadership and our mediators, but as these were neither exclusively new
employees nor new employee-manager relationships, a strict causal order cannot be empirically
verified. Yet, as a post-hoc test of this idea, we split our sample by how long employees had worked
directly for their supervisors, with one group having more than one year of experience with their
leaders, and the other having less than one year. We compared the coefficients for the effects of
servant leadership between these two groups, and found that employees who had worked longer
for their managers had noticeably stronger effects than those who had shorter tenures with their
managers, for whom many coefficients became non-significant. This provides some evidence for the
social learning perspective versus servant leaders recruiting employees already high in these
outcomes. Future research might use qualitative or experience sampling methods to unpack these
relationships, or examine new manager-employee team relationships to determine exactly how
these process develop and play out initially, and over time.
CONCLUSION
For decades women have faced a disadvantage in the leadership arena caused by
discrimination and implicit leader stereotypes (Lord et al., 1984). Our research indicates that servant
leadership, conceptualized as a force for both organizational and societal good intended to help
others become “healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become
servants" (Greenleaf, 1970), may invert this disadvantage. Specifically, servant leadership may turn
the "think leader, think male" prototype on its head and provide females an implicit advantage in
their employee management. This study also suggests the importance of considering team feminine

gender role for the effectiveness of communally focused servant leadership. We provide
encouraging evidence for servant leadership’s key propositions, such that this form of leadership
does in fact help followers become more effective, wiser through prosocial motivation, and more
likely to themselves become servant leaders in a cascading effect (cf. Greenleaf, 1970). However, the
effects of servant leadership are contingent, and we conclude that more attention must be paid to
conditions which may enable or impair servant leadership’s efficacy. Altogether, though, this style of
leadership emerges as a holistic theory of effective management, boosting performance while
prioritizing a range of positive outcomes. In many ways it provides an excellent match for the type of
theoretically supported positive leadership which scholars and practitioners alike have been seeking
for years (Graham, 1982; Hackman, 2010; Nohria & Khurana, 2010).
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Figure 1: Theoretical model

Figure 2: Manager servant leadership and team feminine gender role composition predicting
follower prosocial motivation

Figure 3: Moderated mediation results for Hypothesis 8

Figure 4: Manager servant leadership and manager sex predicting follower servant leadership
Table 1:
Means, standard deviations, & correlations for study variables
M
ea s.
Variables n d. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
1. 0.
Organization 0. 4
2 29 5 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2. 0. 0. -

Organization 18 3 .3
3 9 0*
*
3. 0. - -
Organization 0. 3 .2 .1
4 10 0 1* 6 - - - - - - - - - - - - -
4. 0. - - -
Organization 0. 2 .1 .1 .0
5 06 4 7 2 9 - - - - - - - - - - - -
5. 0. - - - -
Organization 0. 2 .1 .1 .0 .0
6 05 1 4 0 7 6 - - - - - - - - - - -
-
4. .3 - .2 -
6. 1 6* .1 5* .0 .0
6. Team size 08 7 * 6 * 1 5 - - - - - - - - - -
0. -
7. Manager 0. 4 .1 .1 .0 .1 .0 .0
sex1 39 9 0 4 4 7 0 8 - - - - - - - - -
-
0. .3 .4 - - - -
8. Employee 0. 4 .4 8* .2 .0 .0 .1 9* .0 .0 .0 .1 .1 .0 .0
sex1 62 9 9* * 4* 8 2 7 * - 0 1 9 9* 0 1 9
- -
1. .5 .4 .2 - - .3 - - -
9. Tenure in 4. 1 9* 0* 6* .1 .0 .1 .0 6* .5 .0 .0 .0 .0 .0
organization 09 6 * * * 6 6 3 6 * - 9* 7 3 2 8 5
-
1. .3 .3 .4 .6 -
10. Tenure 3. 1 8* 4* .0 .0 .1 .1 .0 0* 6* .0 .0 .0 .1 .1
with manager 26 9 * * 6 3 8 8 1 * * - 5 2 1 6 4
11. Manager 1. .4 - - - .3
servant 5. 1 6* .1 .0 .0 .1 .2 .1 .0 7* .1 .1 .2 .2 .2
leadership 12 5 * 9* 6 9 2 3* 2 9 * 4 - 3 2* 3* 2*
0. - - - .3 .4 - - .3 -
-
12. Feminine 0. 1 .1 .5 .1 .0 .1 .2 6* 0* .2 .1 .0 3* .1 .0

gender role 78 3 6 5* 9* 1 3 8* * * 4* 0 4 * 0 5
* *
- -
0. - .3 .4 .3 .2 - .4 - .2
13. Prosocial 6. 8 .1 5* 7* 4* 3 .1 4* .0 8* .1 .1 .1 .1 .1
motivation 01 2 9* * * * * 0 * 2 * 6 2 0 - 3 2
- -
14. Follower 0. - .2 .2 - - - .2 - .3 .3 .6
servant 5. 8 .2 9* 6* .1 .0 .1 .1 .1 9* .1 1* .2 5* 0*
leadership 13 7 2* * * 0 5 0 3 3 * 7 * 4* * - *
- - -
0. - - - .2 - - .3 .5 .2 .5
15. Follower 6. 7 .1 .2 .0 6* .0 .1 .2 .1 .0 2* .0 8* 7* 0*
performance 05 4 4 0* 1 * 2 3 1* 4 1 * 2 * * * -
Note: Bivariate correlations with n = 415 (Level 1); 109 (Level 2). Correlation
coefficients below the diagonal are team-level (L2)
correlations and coefficients above the diagonal are individual-level (L1)

correlations.
* = p < .05; ** = p < .01.

1
Gender variables dummy coded as 0 = male, 1 = female.
Table 2:
Results of individual hypothesis tests of main effects and interactions (H1-H7)
Follower
Job Prosocial servant Follower job
performance motivation leadership performance
Coefficie S S Coeffici S Coeffici S

nt E Coefficient E ent E ent E
Level 1: Individual
(follower) level
Organizational tenure .03 -.01 .00 .03

.0 .0 .0 .0

5 3 6 4
.0 .0 .0 .0
Tenure with manager .04 4 .00 3 .09 5 .00 3
.0 .0 .0 .0
Employee sex -.01 9 .11 8 -.02 8 -.03 8
.0 .0
Servant leadership .21** 5 .21** 6
.0 .0
Female gender role -.09* 4 .32** 5
.0
Prosocial motivation .05 4
Follower servant .0
leadership .61** 5
.0 .0 .0 .0
Residual variance .50* 7 .60** 4 .57** 7 .33** 5
Level 2: Team level
.0 .0 .0 .0
Team size -.02 1 .00 1 .00 3 -.02 1
.1 .0 .1 .1
Manager sex .13 1 .11 8 .07 2 .08 0
Manager servant .0 .0
leadership .14 7 .03 6
Female gender role .6 .6

composition -.05 3 1.35* 2
Servant leadership * .1 .0
manager sex .14 7 .02 9
Servant leadership * .5 .4
female gender -.47 6 .91* 3
role
composition
.1
Prosocial motivation .32* 2
Follower servant .1
leadership .44** 6

.2 .1 .7 .8
Intercept 6.29* 4 5.96** 2 3.20** 4 3.92** 8
.0 .0 .0 .0
Residual variance .08* 4 .16** 3 .13** 5 .06** 2
2
R .47** .20* .32* .51**
Note: Unstandardized coefficients reported for N=354-419 (individuals); 101-109

(teams). All models include a series of dummy
variables to control for organizations.
* p < .05; ** p < .01, two-tailed.
Table 3:
Indirect effects from servant leadership to follower job performance
95%
Indire confiden
Moderat ct ce
or Mediation effect interval
Hypothesis 8a
Leader Servant leadership  prosocial motivation  follower servant

sex leadership  performance
[-
.008,.073
Conditional effect for female leader .016 ]
[-
.011,.029
Conditional effect for male leader .005 ]
Unhypothesized effect in model

Servant leadership  follower servant leadership  performance
[.125,.58
Conditional effect for female leader .327* 5]
[-
.003,.298
Conditional effect for male leader .149 ]
Hypothesis 8b
Team Servant leadership  prosocial motivation  follower servant

feminine leadership  performance
gender
role [.015,.47
composit Conditional effect for high feminine gender role composition .169* 1]
ion [-.424,-
Conditional effect for low feminine gender role composition -.154 .009]
Note: Unstandardized indirect effects and bootstrapped confidence intervals reported for N=
356-406 (individuals); 101-109 (teams).
* CI excludes zero. Two-tailed tests.

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Servant leadership, leader gender, and team gender role:

Testing a female advantage in a cascading model of performance

G. James Lemoinea (corresponding author)

260 Jacobs Management Center, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA 716-645-3236

800 W. Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30308, USA 404-894-4924

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

.Servant leadership, leader gender, and team gender role:

Testing a female advantage in a cascading model of performance

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

serial mediation effects of a manager’s team servant leadership on a follower’s performance,

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be of particular importance to women in leadership roles, as it provides a method by which they

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES

Consistent with previous scholarship, we consider servant leadership as influence behaviors,

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be more effective than traditional goal-centric leadership in terms of growing organizational

leadership is fundamentally a process of guiding followers to act as servant leaders themselves

indicates servant leadership’s primarily communal nature. By comparison, transformational and

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differences in how and when it may affect outcomes.

Servant leadership’s contingent effect on performance

The evidence connecting servant leadership to enhanced employee job performance is

predictive over a variety of potential situations, theoretical specification of moderators is necessary

perspective by which to frame such an investigation.

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effective social learning.

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theory, referencing more communal forms of leadership:

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performance than men when engaging in servant leadership.

Hypothesis 1: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower performance are

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stronger effects on performance.

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Prosocial motivation as a mediating mechanism

Lemoine et al., 2019).

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& Bachrach, 2012; Gollwitzer, 1990).

Hypothesis 3: Servant leadership is positively related to follower prosocial motivation.

prosocial motivation much as we hypothesized with servant leadership’s impact on employees’

gender congruity matches, without which social learning is suppressed.

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Hypothesis 4: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower prosocial motivation

Hypothesis 5: The positive effects of servant leadership on follower prosocial motivation

Follower servant leadership and performance

The enactment of servant leadership behaviors by organization members who are

"Discriminating and determined servants as followers are as important as servant-leaders, and

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motivation. Altogether, prosocial motivation is a mechanism through which servant leadership

behaviors should be somewhat contagious.

Hypothesis 6: Prosocial motivation is positively related to servant leadership behavior enacted

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enhanced efficiency and coordination generated by stronger relationships and information-sharing

Hypothesis 7: Follower servant leadership is positively related to job performance.

of servant leadership’s effects on performance, as illustrated in Figure 1. The effect of team

behaviors. This indicates our final hypotheses of conditional indirect effects:

Hypothesis 8b:The positive relationship between supervisor servant leadership and

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We tested this model by studying employees and managers of six organizations

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Roth, & Oliveira, 2010).