Servant leadership, organisational trust, and bank employee outcomes

Abstract

Using servant leadership and social exchange theories as the theoretical frameworks, our study proposes and tests a research model that investigates trust in organisation (TIO) as a mediator of the impact of servant leadership on three critical outcomes. These outcomes are intention to be late for work (ILW), creative performance, and service recovery performance. Data obtained from frontline bank employees in three waves at one-week apart and their managers in Saint Petersburg in Russia were used to test the aforementioned relationships. The results demonstrate that TIO is an immediate outcome of servant leadership. TIO gives rise to lower ILW and higher creative and service recovery performances. The aforesaid findings reveal that servant leadership mitigates ILW and boosts both creative and service recovery performances only through TIO. Implications for theory and practice are discussed in our paper.