Emotional intelligence and servant leadership: A meta‐analytic review

Abstract

Servant leadership is an effective leadership style that focuses on ethics and morality. Emotional intelligence (EI) is also associated with effective leadership and ethical behavior; thus, there has been a surge in studies that assessed the link between EI and servant leadership. Nevertheless, the empirical landscape of this relationship is mixed and fragmented. We undertook a meta-analysis to clarify this literature and found that (1) emotional intelligence (EI) has a significant positive relationship with servant leadership (ρ = .57); (2) the relationship between EI and servant leadership is stronger in studies having a lower percentage of well-educated subjects, in low power distance cultures, and in high institutional collectivism cultures; and (3) We were unable to find sufficient evidence to support moderating effects of the relationship between EI and servant leadership for gender (male-dominated and female-dominated studies), age (between young and old subjects), for self-report versus follower-report of servant leadership, and across different scales of servant leadership.