Servant Leadership and Cooperation: The Moderating Role of Leader Group Prototypicality

Abstract

While prior research has demonstrated strong links between servant leadership and cooperation, the question arises as to what factors influence this relationship. The present study examined leader group prototypicality as a boundary condition of the relationship between servant leadership and cooperation. In addition, we examined the conditional indirect effect of servant leadership and leader group prototypicality on helping behaviors via group identification. Two studies—a single-time survey study and a three-time panel survey study—were conducted to test our assertions. The results from Study 1 demonstrated that servant leaders were more likely to promote feelings of cooperation among followers when the leaders were perceived as more group prototypical. However, servant leadership was not related to cooperation for followers who did not perceive their leader as group prototypical. The results from Study 2 demonstrated that group identification was found to mediate the relationship between servant leadership and follower cooperation. The results from the conditional indirect effect analysis demonstrated that the mediated effect is strongest when servant leaders are perceived as prototypical of the group, highlighting the crucial role of prototypicality in the servant leadership process.