Trajectories and Associations of Perceived Servant Leadership and Teacher Exhaustion During the First Months of a Crisis

Abstract Organizational crises carry a high risk of reducing well-being and health among employees, such as increased exhaustion. Teachers are particularly vulnerable to exhaustion; thus, it is important to explore how exhaustion can be reduced among them in a crisis context. In this paper, we regard servant leadership as a resource-providing leadership style to mitigate the adverse impacts of a crisis situation on teachers’ exhaustion. We surveyed 129 teachers working at several schools in a German private school association at four measurement points between March and November 2020, beginning with the first measures taken in response to the spread of COVID-19. Using latent growth curve modeling, we investigated the trajectories of perceived servant leadership and employees’ exhaustion and their associations. For both teacher exhaustion and servant leadership, growth models with unspecified growth patterns showed the best fit. Perceived servant leadership decreased over time before increasing slightly again during the last measurement period. We did not find a general increase in teacher exhaustion. Consistent with our hypotheses, the results indicated a negative interindividual and intraindividual association between servant leadership and teacher exhaustion. Teachers who perceived higher levels of servant leadership reported lower levels of exhaustion, and the stronger servant leadership decreased, the stronger exhaustion increased over time. Our study extends previous research by providing a dynamic, longitudinal view of servant leadership and exhaustion in a crisis context.