A bittersweet experience: How does engaging in servant leader behaviors influence the actor's work engagement.

Most prior research has only examined the consequences of servant leadership for the followers or organizations. In this study, applying conservation of resources (COR) theory, we developed a moderated mediation model to investigate how engaging in servant leader behaviors impacts the actors themselves. We conducted a questionnaire survey at three large companies in China, and finally received valid responses from 479 employees who occupied leadership positions with an average age of 36.43 years old. We analyzed the collected data and tested the proposed hypotheses by using SPSS 25.0 and Mplus 8.3. The results revealed the possible benefits and costs of exhibiting servant leader behaviors for actors. Specifically, we found that engaging in servant leader behaviors can promote leaders' psychological meaningfulness, thus aiding their work engagement. Besides, we also found that servant leader behaviors can lead to leaders' increasing emotional exhaustion, thus lowering their work engagement. Furthermore, leaders experienced greater psychological meaningfulness and less emotional exhaustion when they received more support from their followers. This study provides insights into servant leadership literature by painting a complete picture about how servant leader behaviors impact the actor's resources gain and loss. These findings suggest that organizations should not blindly exaggerate the positive impacts of servant leadership, but use a dialectic perspective to view its effects on the actors. In practice, despite encouraging leaders to display servant behaviors, organizations also should organize respite activities or encourage leaders to take little breaks at work in order to help them recover from depletion. Moreover, followers' support for servant leaders also should be emphasized to replenish leaders' depleted resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]