The impact of servant leadership on collaborative culture in UAE multicultural healthcare organizations

PURPOSE: This study aims to investigate the role of servant leadership in fostering a collaborative culture within healthcare organizations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), examining the mediating roles of trust in leaders and perceived organizational support (POS) through the lens of Social Exchange Theory (SET) as the study's central organizing framework. The UAE's multicultural healthcare workforce provides the empirical context for this study; cultural diversity is theorized as a factor that may plausibly strengthen the proposed mechanisms, though this proposition is not directly tested in the present design. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The study employs a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, collecting data from 312 healthcare professionals across six healthcare organizations (three public, three private) in the UAE. Structural equation modeling is used to test hypothesized direct and indirect relationships among servant leadership, trust in leaders, POS and collaborative culture, with full measurement model validation, bias-corrected bootstrapping (5,000 resamples), common method bias testing, and assessment of organizational clustering via intraclass correlations and cluster-robust standard errors. FINDINGS: The findings reveal that servant leadership has a significant positive association with collaborative culture, both directly and indirectly through trust in leaders and POS, with both mediators supporting partial mediation. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Theoretically, the study specifies how two distinct SET pathways - relational (trust) and organizational (POS) - jointly link servant leadership to collaborative culture. Practically, it suggests specific leadership-development practices organizations can adopt to enhance teamwork and organizational effectiveness. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study contributes to theory by specifying the dual-pathway mechanism through which servant leadership fosters collaborative culture and by conducting this investigation in a multicultural, high-stakes UAE healthcare setting in which cultural diversity is a plausible - though here theorized rather than tested - amplifier of these mechanisms.