Servant leadership and tertius iungens orientation – employee’s collaborative brokerage orientation as facilitator of organizational success in the era of digitalization
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2024
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Management and International Business (MIB)
Language
en
Pages
59
Series
Abstract
This study explores the relationship between the perceived servant leadership and tertius iungens orientation, as well as the possible factors affecting them. Tertius iungens orientation (TIO) “the third who joins” (Obstfeld, 2005) is a strategic and behavioral orientation where person, using her or his social networks, tries to connect people who would benefit from an alliance or tries to connect two disconnected actors/operators. These alliance and social network builders are important resource to the companies due to fact, that organization, team, and individual benefits from collaborative brokerage orientation. For example, TI orientated people’s behavior helps to build trust between people and thus it helps co-workers to increase team cohesion. On the other hand, it benefits the company, hence trust between parties is a productive platform for innovations, efficient negotiations, and deal making, but also for developing the working community (Chan and Mak, 2014; Obstfeld, 2005). All these aspects are connected to the company’s overall performance. Secondly, when the competition for the most skilled employees will intensify in the future, one key point to growth is to explore the leadership styles. Current and future leadership research have focused on examining reciprocal action or influence between leader and employee (Avolio et al., 2009). Scholars have eagerly tried to identify the effective leadership style and factors that improve organizational performance. This study examines the servant leadership behavior’s possibility to enforce or cause employee’s collaborative brokerage orientation (TIO), since servant leadership has proven to have several positive outcomes. Also, Bandura’s (1977) Social learning theory serves a model (learning via observation, imitation and modelling) to explore servant leadership behavior effects on employee’s behavior (Liden, 2008; Liden 2015). In addition, the moderating role of general-self efficacy and networking ability was explored. The data for this multilevel analysis was collected via quantitative questionnaire from 344 employees in 18 organizations. The results indicate that individual with high networking ability benefits of leader’s servant leadership behavior when observing the degree of employee’s tertius iungens orientation.Description
Thesis advisor
Diehl, Marjo-RiittaKeywords
servant leadership, tertius iungens orientation, general self-efficacy, networking ability