Come on, Others, Light My Fire: A Resource Gain Perspective on the Daily Benefits of Servant Leadership Behaviors for the Leaders Themselves

Although servant leadership is vital to individual, team, and organizational success, an emerging stream of literature has documented that such behaviors are pursued at the expense of the leader’s personal resources. We challenge the notion that servant leadership behaviors solely result in resource loss, by advancing a resource gain perspective. Integrating insights from servant leadership theory with broaden-and-build theory, we assert that enacting servant leadership behaviors generate physiological, psychological, and relational resources for the leaders themselves. Using an experience sampling design across two work weeks, we found that servant leadership behaviors earlier in the day produced a positive affective experience for the leader which facilitated heightened levels of vitality, intrinsic motivation, and work meaningfulness later in the day. However, the resource generating benefits of servant leadership behaviors were more likely to accrue to leaders who ‘buy into’ servant leadership, as evidenced by espousing values that are consistent with the self-subordinating ethos that undergirds servant leadership theory. Simply put, the servant first mindset proposed in seminal servant leadership theory is an important prerequisite to benefit from its resource generating effects. Our actor-centric approach to understanding the daily regenerative effects of servant leadership behaviors for the leaders themselves yields multiple theoretical, empirical, and practical insights.