Stronger Together: Conditional Indirect Effect of Servant Leadership on Transactive Memory Systems

Abstract

The leadership literature suggests that followers are likely to be autonomously motivated when working for servant leaders, leading them to experience greater psychological empowerment. Guided by self-determination theory, we predicted that this empowerment would then heighten individuals’ perceptions of their teams’ transactive memory systems. When subordinates perceive that discrimination is occurring in their workgroup, however, we expected that the empowerment—transactive memory systems link would be weakened. This moderated mediation model was tested at multiple timepoints using 211 employees from a variety of industries and job types. The results generally supported our predictions, and the implications for theory and practice are discussed.