Servant Leadership and Frontline Outcomes

In the evolution of theory and practice germane to managerial leadership styles, servant leadership has been advanced as an effective approach for engaging, developing, and retaining employees. Servant leaders place their employees’ interests at the forefront and exhibit high levels of empathy. These actions are particularly important in managing frontline employees. As boundary spanners for their organization, frontline employees contend with a complex and challenging array of demands from both intra- and extra-organizational members. As such, numerous studies have examined servant leadership’s impact on frontline employee attitudes and outcomes. However, insights within the frontline employee domain have yet to be aggregated and analyzed via meta-analytic techniques. Meta-analysis is important in this area because the effect sizes between servant leadership and frontline employee variables possess considerable variance. Study findings provide aggregated knowledge from 16,350 respondents in 58 independent samples to deliver a holistic appraisal of servant leadership’s effect in frontline contexts. The meta-analytic results establish the value of servant leadership in increasing desirable frontline attitudes and outcomes (e.g., customer orientation, performance), as well as reducing undesirable associations (e.g., stress, turnover intentions).