IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jbuset/v124y2014i3p453-464.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Influence of Servant Leadership on Restaurant Employee Engagement

Author

Listed:
  • Danon Carter
  • Timothy Baghurst

Abstract

Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy which addresses the concerns of ethics, customer experience, and employee engagement while creating a unique organizational culture where both leaders and followers unite to reach organizational goals without positional or authoritative power. With employees viewed as one of the greatest assets for organizations, maintaining loyal, productive employees while balancing profits becomes a challenge for leaders, and drives the need to understand employee engagement drivers. Thus, the purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore servant leadership from the perspective of employees. Participants were 11 employees from a servant leadership led restaurant who took part in two focus groups. The modified van Kaam method (Moustakas 1994 ) contributed to data analysis, which examined employee responses for comparison and assessment. Several themes emerged including servant leader experience, servant leader traits, the impact of servant leadership, the application of servant leadership, and limited employee attrition. The themes revealed servant leadership positively influences employee engagement while contributing to employee loyalty to the workplace. Based on the servant leader experience, participants were more committed, built healthy work relationships, and actively participated in achieving organizational goals. Findings are discussed in light of current research and practical applications are provided. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Danon Carter & Timothy Baghurst, 2014. "The Influence of Servant Leadership on Restaurant Employee Engagement," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 124(3), pages 453-464, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:124:y:2014:i:3:p:453-464
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1882-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-013-1882-0
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10551-013-1882-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anthony Miyazaki & Kimberly Taylor, 2008. "Researcher Interaction Biases and Business Ethics Research: Respondent Reactions to Researcher Characteristics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 81(4), pages 779-795, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yucheng Zhang & Yuyan Zheng & Long Zhang & Shan Xu & Xin Liu & Wansi Chen, 2021. "A meta-analytic review of the consequences of servant leadership: The moderating roles of cultural factors," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 38(1), pages 371-400, March.
    2. Farida Saleem & Yingying Zhang Zhang & C. Gopinath & Ahmad Adeel, 2020. "Impact of Servant Leadership on Performance: The Mediating Role of Affective and Cognitive Trust," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(1), pages 21582440199, January.
    3. Rawan Alafeshat & Cem Tanova, 2019. "Servant Leadership Style and High-Performance Work System Practices: Pathway to a Sustainable Jordanian Airline Industry," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(22), pages 1-21, November.
    4. Sigurdur Ragnarsson & Erla S. Kristjánsdóttir & Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir, 2018. "To Be Accountable While Showing Care: The Lived Experience of People in a Servant Leadership Organization," SAGE Open, , vol. 8(3), pages 21582440188, September.
    5. Tomasz Gigol & Katarzyna Kreczmanska-Gigol & Renata Pajewska-Kwasny, 2021. "Socially Responsible Leadership’s Impact on Stakeholder Management, Staff Job Satisfaction and Work Engagement," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(Special 4), pages 775-805.
    6. Ahmed Mohammed Sayed Mostafa & Sam Farley & Monica Zaharie, 2021. "Examining the Boundaries of Ethical Leadership: The Harmful Effect of Co-worker Social Undermining on Disengagement and Employee Attitudes," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 174(2), pages 355-368, November.
    7. Sarah Kimakwa & Jorge A. Gonzalez & Hale Kaynak, 2023. "Social Entrepreneur Servant Leadership and Social Venture Performance: How are They Related?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 182(1), pages 95-118, January.
    8. Émilie Lapointe & Christian Vandenberghe, 2018. "Examination of the Relationships Between Servant Leadership, Organizational Commitment, and Voice and Antisocial Behaviors," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 148(1), pages 99-115, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bethan Naunton Morgan & Gill Windle & Carolien Lamers & Emilie Brotherhood & Sebastian Crutch, 2023. "Adaptation of an eHealth Intervention: iSupport for Carers of People with Rare Dementias," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 21(1), pages 1-19, December.
    2. Arne Weigold & Ingrid K. Weigold & Migyeong Jang & Emily M. Thornton, 2022. "College students’ and Mechanical Turk workers’ environmental factors while completing online surveys," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 56(4), pages 2589-2612, August.
    3. Faizan, Riffat & Zehra, Nasreen, 2016. "Quality Work-Life as predictor to Organisational Commitment under contrasting Leadership Styles: I.T Responses from Pakistan's private software houses," MPRA Paper 73973, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Asif Mohammad Shahan & Ferdous Jahan & Rizwan Khair, 2021. "A glimpse of light in darkness: Performance‐based accountability in Bangladesh public administration," Public Administration & Development, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(4), pages 191-202, October.
    5. Emma Bell & Nik Winchester & Edward Wray-Bliss, 2021. "Enchantment in Business Ethics Research," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 174(2), pages 251-262, November.
    6. Michael S. McLeod & G. Tyge Payne & Robert E. Evert, 2016. "Organizational Ethics Research: A Systematic Review of Methods and Analytical Techniques," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 134(3), pages 429-443, March.
    7. Humaira Asad & Iqra Toqeer & Khalid Mahmood, 2021. "A qualitative phenomenological exploration of social mood and investors’ risk tolerance in an emerging economy," Qualitative Research in Financial Markets, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 14(1), pages 189-211, August.
    8. Melissa Lentz & Orie Berezan & Carola Raab, 2022. "Uncovering the relationship between revenue management and hotel loyalty programs," Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 21(3), pages 306-320, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:124:y:2014:i:3:p:453-464. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.