Chapter 6: The Heart of The Servant Leader: Leader’s Motivation-to-Serve and Its Impact on LMX and Subordinates’ Extra-Role Behaviors

A major challenge of the knowledge economy lies with the firm’s ability to maximize the intellectual potential of its employees. We contend that servant leadership—an emerging and increasingly popular leadership philosophy— is of important relevance to organizations aiming to leverage on their human capital. Servant-leadership theory, a values-based approach, advocates that the leader’s first priority is to serve the followers. Although the theory is popular with practitioners, there is little research on the impact of servant leadership. We proposed a new leadership characteristic called “motivation- to-serve” (MTS) to reflect the heart of the servant leader. We then developed a measure of MTS and conducted three studies to validate the scale. Our results demonstrate that leaders with greater MTS develop higher quality LMX with their subordinates, which in turn encourages subordinates to help others and to speak up with constructive suggestions. We discuss the implications of MTS for both leadership research and practice.