More Illusion Than Reality? A Review of the State of Research on the Causal Effects of Servant Leadership, Recommendations, and an Exemplary Study

The concept of servant leadership has received growing interest in recent years. However, in a systematic review, we found no clean causal investigations of its direct and mediating effects. We will thus explain the methodological problems in current research and present recommendations on how the causal effects of servant leadership can be investigated. As an illustration of our recommendations, we will examine the effect of two dimensions of servant leadership (i.e., stewardship and authenticity) on followers’ cognitive performance with an online experiment. Additionally, we will investigate the effect of authenticity and stewardship perceptions using an instrumental variable estimation approach. Thereby, we can determine the potential bias due to endogeneity. We aim to recruit British working-age individuals using a common panel provider. The sample size will be determined in a pretest. Our hypotheses will be tested by means of an experimental online study with two groups (authenticity and stewardship vs. neutral speech). This is a preregistration of the article: Schowalter, A. F., & Volmer, J. (2023). Are the effects of servant leadership only spurious? The state of research on the causal effects of servant leadership, recommendations, and an illustrative experiment. In The Leadership Quarterly (p. 101722). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101722 unknown other