Pretesting Video Speeches to Manipulate Perceptions and Examining Strength of Instruments for an Experiment on Servant Leadership and Performance

The concept of servant leadership has received growing interest in recent years. To date, however, there are no clean causal investigations of the effects of servant leadership on followers’ performance because of endogeneity issues. Moreover, the concept has mostly been studied via questionnaires, which can lead to disputable policy implications. We are the first to use an instrumental variable approach in the context of servant leadership and created new material based on the literature. This pre-study thus serves to test how followers perceive the leader manipulation and to examine the strength of our instrumental variables (i.e., manipulation of leadership style and leader gender and agreeableness). We aim to recruit at least 200 working-age individuals using a common panel provider. Our hypotheses will be tested by means of an experimental online study with a 2 (servant leadership vs. neutral speech) x 2 (male vs. female leader) factorial design. other