Fostering task and adaptive performance through employee well-being: The role of servant leadership

In this study, we provide insights on how servant leadership may promote employee performance. We investigate whether the associations between increases in servant leadership and employees’ task and adaptive performance are mediated by changes in the two antipodes of employee well-being: work engagement and burnout. We utilized a two-wave survey data (N = 2453) collected from 34 organizations and latent change score modeling as an analytical approach to examine associations among within-person changes. Our findings showed that increased perceptions of servant leadership were associated with increases in work engagement and decreases in burnout. Increases in work engagement were associated with increases in task performance and four subfacets of adaptive performance (i.e., stress management, reactivity, creativity, and interpersonal adaptivity). Decreases in burnout were associated with increases in task performance. Our findings suggest that improved servant leadership practices may foster employees’ task and adaptive performance especially through the promotion of work engagement. JEL CLASSIFICATION: L200 Firm Objectives, Organization, Behavior: General