Servant leadership and abusive leadership on employee work engagement: the role of psychological safety and leader distance

Abstract

Studies have found that a high level of work engagement links to better business performance, higher revenue growth, higher profitability and higher customer satisfaction, yet according to Gallup, only 13% of global employees are engaged at work.

Leadership has been found to play a central role in improving employee work engagement level, yet the mechanism has yet to be fully understood. This research explores the effects of leadership styles (servant leadership and abusive leadership) on employee work engagement, taking into account the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderator role of leader distance.

The data used in this study is a subset of the data collected through a broader research project run by Exponential team. The questionnaires were sent to 4046 participants in Finnish companies, which resulted in 1130 nearly complete responses. The respondents are employees working in eleven Finnish SMEs and corporations. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used in analyzing the data.

The findings suggest that psychological safety partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership and work engagement and fully mediates the relationship between abusive leadership and work engagement. As predicted, servant leadership is positively related to work engagement and abusive leadership is negatively related to work engagement. Leader distance is found to negatively moderates the relationship between abusive leadership and psychological safety while having no effects on the relationship between servant leadership and psychological safety.

The study provides insights into how employee’s psychological well-being can affect employee engagement and how leader behaviors can promote or discourage employees from engaging at work. By including leader distance as a moderator, the study also considers how leadership influences are affected by today’s new work practices: remote work and virtual work. Overall, the study findings advocate for organizations to adopt servant leadership practices of fostering a sense of community, focusing on long-lasting relationship building and taking good care of employees to build a working environment where employees feel connected and thriving at work.