MGMT 501 Week 7 Literature Review: Final Submission Example

Serving to Keep Them: A Literature Review on Servant Leadership and the Retention of Frontline Service Employees

Introduction

Frontline service employees, the cashiers, servers, call center agents, nursing assistants and store associates who meet customers every day, are among the most likely workers in the economy to leave their jobs. Each departure costs an organization recruiting and training expenses and weeks of reduced productivity, and high turnover weakens the relationships with customers that service businesses depend on. Research on why employees stay or leave has increasingly pointed to the immediate supervisor. Holtom et al. (2008), reviewing turnover research, describe a shift from models focused on job satisfaction and alternatives toward models that include relationships and embeddedness, and Hom et al. (2017), surveying a century of the field, note that the field has turned more and more toward supervisors as a reason people remain. If supervisors matter for retention, the question becomes which kind of supervision matters most.

This review examines one candidate: servant leadership, an approach in which the leader attends first to followers' development and welfare. The review asks whether servant leadership is associated with the retention of frontline service employees and, if so, through what mechanisms. Searches in two business and psychology databases paired servant leadership with turnover, retention, service and frontline work, and were selected for relevance, peer review and recency, with several foundational works included for definition. The review is organized by theme: the meaning of servant leadership, its distinctiveness, its outcomes in frontline settings, the mechanisms that may explain those outcomes, the strength of the retention evidence, a Christian perspective, implications for practice and directions for research.

The Scope of the Problem

Frontline turnover is not a marginal cost. In restaurants, retail and call centers, annual turnover among hourly employees commonly runs far above the rates seen in professional work, and organizations in these industries often replace a large share of their workforce every year. Each replacement requires recruiting, onboarding and training, and new employees take weeks or months to reach full productivity. The costs are not only financial. Customers notice when experienced staff leave, and the employees who remain absorb extra work while new hires learn. Holtom et al. (2008) note that turnover research has moved toward explaining why people stay as well as why they leave, a shift that directs attention to the daily experience of work, including relationships with supervisors. Frontline employees rarely interact with senior leaders, so their immediate supervisor is, for practical purposes, the organization. If that supervisor can make the job one worth keeping, the organization gains an advantage that pay increases alone may not provide.

Defining Servant Leadership

The term comes from Greenleaf (1970), whose essay described a leader who is servant first, someone whose wish to serve precedes and shapes any wish to lead. Greenleaf proposed that the best test of such leadership lies in the followers: whether they grow as persons and become more capable and more inclined to serve others themselves. The essay did not offer a measurable definition, and for two decades the idea spread mainly through practitioner writing. Sendjaya and Sarros (2002) helped bring it into scholarship by tracing its roots to the teaching and example of Jesus as well as to Greenleaf, and by describing servant leaders as stewards who hold their position in trust for the people they lead.

The most influential synthesis came from van Dierendonck (2011), who reviewed the construct's history, characteristics and measures and proposed a model where the desire to serve, paired with readiness to take charge, appears in six patterns of conduct, which he lists as empowering and developing followers, humility, being genuine, accepting people as they are, giving direction and acting as a steward. In his model, these behaviors work through high-quality relationships, trust and fairness to produce positive follower attitudes and performance. Eva et al. (2019), reviewing 285 articles published over 20 years, refined the definition further, calling it a follower-first way of leading that puts each person's own needs and interests and extends that care beyond the team to the organization and the society around it. Their review also evaluated 16 measures and found that they vary considerably in rigor, a point that matters when comparing studies that used different instruments.

Across these sources, three features recur. Servant leadership centers on followers rather than on the leader or the organization; it is grounded in the leader's motives, not only in behavior; and it looks beyond the work unit to the community the organization serves. These features distinguish it from approaches that treat follower development as a means to organizational ends.

Is Servant Leadership Distinct?

A skeptic might argue that servant leadership is transformational leadership with a different name, since both involve inspiring and developing followers. Two meta-analyses address this concern directly. Hoch et al. (2018) set three newer, values-centered styles against the transformational benchmark across a wide set of outcomes. Measures of ethical and authentic leadership moved almost in step with transformational measures and contributed little of their own, whereas servant leadership showed greater promise of accounting for outcomes beyond transformational leadership. Lee et al. (2020), analyzing 130 independent studies, went further: across individual and team outcomes, servant leadership still predicted results after the transformational, authentic and ethical styles had been taken into account.

Measurement research supports the same conclusion. Liden et al. (2008) developed a 28-item, seven-dimension measure of servant leadership whose scores forecast how employees fared at work beyond what transformational ratings and leader-member exchange already explained. Dimensions such as healing emotional hurts, giving followers real authority, developing them, ranking their interests first and acting with integrity describe behaviors that transformational measures do not capture well, especially the leader's willingness to place followers' interests ahead of the leader's own. Taken together, the meta-analytic and measurement evidence suggests that servant leadership is a distinct construct worth studying on its own terms, though its overlap with other positive leadership styles means that studies should control for them where possible.

Outcomes in Frontline Service Settings

Several of the strongest studies of servant leadership come from frontline service settings, which makes them directly relevant to this review. The most rigorous is the study by Liden et al. (2014) of 961 employees in 71 restaurants belonging to one chain. The authors proposed that servant leaders shape a serving culture, a shared expectation that members of the unit put the needs of customers and coworkers first. Restaurants with a stronger serving culture performed better as units, and their employees were rated higher on performance, creativity and service to customers and reported weaker intentions to quit, both directly and through employees' identification with their restaurant. The study used five sources of data, including customers and internal and external audits, which reduces the risk that results reflect a single respondent's view.

Retail evidence points the same way. Hunter et al. (2013) studied store managers and their employees and reported that stores led by more serving managers saw more helping among staff, better customer service and with employees who were less inclined to quit or to withdraw effort, an effect that ran partly through the store's climate for service. Their title, which describes servant leaders as inspiring servant followers, captures the central claim: servant leadership spreads through a unit as employees adopt the leader's orientation toward others. Ehrhart (2004), studying 249 grocery store departments, found that departments led by servant leaders showed more cooperative, extra-role behavior as a unit, and that a shared sense of fair procedures carried part of that effect. Though Ehrhart did not measure turnover, his findings place the effect in the department itself, the setting where frontline employees actually live their working days.

Hospitals offer a further test. Neubert et al. (2016) studied nursing units and found that the influence of a servant leader on nurses and patients depended on the unit's organizational structure, a reminder that leadership effects are shaped by context. Hospital units differ from restaurants and stores in their regulation, their stakes and the professional identity of their staff, so evidence that servant leadership matters there broadens the review's conclusions, while the role of structure cautions against treating servant leadership as effective in every setting.

Across these settings, a consistent pattern emerges. Servant leadership is associated with employees' service behavior, cooperation and attachment to their unit, outcomes that matter for retention because employees who identify with their unit and help their coworkers are embedded in relationships that make leaving costlier.

Mechanisms: Why Servant Leadership Might Retain Employees

If servant leadership is related to retention, the next question is why. The literature offers four complementary mechanisms. The first is trust and relationship quality. Van Dierendonck (2011) proposed that servant leadership works through high-quality dyadic relationships and trust, and Lee et al. (2020) found that trust in the leader and leader-member exchange partly explained servant leadership's relationships with outcomes. Employees who trust their supervisors are more likely to raise problems, accept guidance and stay through difficult periods.

The second mechanism is fairness. Mayer et al. (2008) described a sequence running from servant leadership to employees' sense of being treated justly, from there to needs being met and finally to satisfaction with the job. Ehrhart (2004) and Lee et al. (2020) both identified procedural justice as a pathway. Frontline employees often experience their jobs as subject to rules made far away; a supervisor who explains decisions and treats people consistently can make those rules feel fair.

The third mechanism is the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Chiniara and Bentein (2016), drawing on self-determination theory, found that servant leaders improved individual performance largely by meeting three needs people bring to work: to direct their own efforts, to feel capable and to feel connected to others. A supervisor who empowers employees, helps them develop skills and attends to their well-being meets exactly these needs, and need satisfaction is associated with the kind of autonomous motivation that sustains people in demanding jobs.

The fourth mechanism is fit and commitment. Jaramillo et al. (2009), surveying 501 salespeople, traced the link between a servant-leading manager and a salesperson's plan to quit through several steps: how ethical the company seemed, how well the person fit it and how committed the person felt. For frontline employees, a servant leader may represent the organization at its best, strengthening fit and commitment even where the wider organization falls short.

These mechanisms are not competing explanations. A servant leader builds trust, treats people fairly, meets their needs for growth and belonging and strengthens their connection to the organization, and each of these processes makes staying more attractive than leaving. Servant leadership seems to retain people not through any single lever but by changing the whole experience of being supervised.

Boundary Conditions

Servant leadership does not appear to work equally well everywhere. Jaramillo et al. (2009) found that its relationship with salespeople's outcomes was stronger when employees perceived their organization as unethical, which suggests that a servant leader may matter most where the wider organization is least trustworthy. Neubert et al. (2016) found that the structure of hospital units shaped how much a servant leader influenced nurses and patients. Lee et al. (2020) examined moderators across 130 studies, including research design, national culture and industry, and found that the strength of relationships varied across these conditions. For frontline service organizations, these findings imply that servant leadership is likely to help, but that its effects will depend on the organization around the supervisor: a servant leader in a unit with impossible staffing levels or arbitrary policies may soften their effects without overcoming them. Organizations that want the benefits of servant leadership must also attend to the systems their supervisors work within.

The Strength of the Retention Evidence

The evidence reviewed so far is encouraging, but its limits must be acknowledged. Most studies measure turnover intentions rather than actual turnover. Intentions predict departures, but imperfectly, and an intervention that lowers intentions may not lower departures if labor market conditions or personal circumstances intervene. Most studies are also cross-sectional, measuring servant leadership and outcomes at the same time, which makes it difficult to rule out reverse causation: employees who are already committed may perceive their supervisors more favorably. Exceptions such as the multisource design of Liden et al. (2014) strengthen confidence, but few studies follow employees over time. Finally, Eva et al. (2019) found wide variation in the quality of servant leadership measures, so results from studies using weaker instruments should be read cautiously. The fairest conclusion is that servant leadership is consistently associated with lower turnover intentions and with conditions known to support retention, but that direct evidence on actual departures remains limited.

A Christian Perspective

For a Christian reader, servant leadership is not only a research construct but an echo of a central teaching. When two of his disciples sought positions of honor, Jesus told them that among his followers greatness would be measured by service, and that the Son of Man had come not to be waited on but to wait on others (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Mark 10:42-45). Sendjaya and Sarros (2002) trace servant leadership to this teaching. Satterlee (2018) presents management and leadership from a Christian perspective that treats employees as persons of worth to be developed rather than resources to be used, and Dees (2013) describes leaders who build resilience in their people by caring for them through adversity.

The research reviewed here offers an unexpected confirmation of these convictions. Leaders who put their followers' growth first appear, on the evidence, to build units in which people serve one another, perform well and wish to stay. A Christian leader should be careful not to adopt servant leadership merely because it retains employees; service that is only a technique for reducing turnover is not what the teaching describes. Yet the convergence is worth noting: the way of leading that Scripture commends also appears to be good for the people being led and for the organizations they work in. The finding also carries a challenge for Christian managers in frontline settings, who may supervise people working for modest wages under pressure from customers and quotas. Serving those employees means more than kind words; it means pressing for adequate staffing, explaining decisions honestly, protecting people from abusive customers and investing in their growth even when they may eventually leave for better jobs.

Implications for Practice

Three implications follow for service organizations. First, organizations should select frontline supervisors for their orientation toward serving others as well as for technical skill, since the evidence suggests that supervisors shape unit culture and employees' attachment. Second, supervisor development programs should teach the specific behaviors associated with servant leadership, such as helping employees grow, explaining decisions fairly and attending to employees' well-being, and should give supervisors the time to practice them. Third, organizations should measure what matters: tracking actual turnover and service outcomes by supervisor, alongside employee perceptions of their supervisors, would let leaders see whether their investment is working. A regional restaurant or retail chain could begin simply, by adding a short servant leadership measure to its annual employee survey, linking the results to each store's turnover records and comparing stores over two or three years. Such an internal study would not meet the standards of published research, but it would tell the organization whether the relationships found in the literature hold among its own people and supervisors, and it would identify supervisors whose practices others could learn from.

Gaps and Directions for Future Research

The review points to several gaps. Longitudinal studies that measure servant leadership and then follow actual departures over a year or more are needed to strengthen causal claims. Frontline settings beyond restaurants and retail, such as home health care and call centers, deserve study, since their working conditions differ. Research should also examine boundary conditions, building on Neubert et al. (2016), to learn where servant leadership matters most. Finally, intervention studies that train supervisors in servant leadership and compare their units with others would provide the most useful evidence for practice. Such studies are difficult, because organizations rarely allow random assignment of supervisors to training, but staggered rollouts across stores or units could approximate an experiment and give managers the kind of evidence they find most persuasive.

Conclusion

The question this review began with was whether a serving style of supervision keeps frontline service workers in their jobs. The evidence suggests that it does, or at least that it is consistently associated with lower turnover intentions and with the conditions that support retention: a serving culture, trust, fairness, satisfied needs and fit with the organization. Servant leadership is a distinct construct that explains outcomes beyond transformational leadership, and its effects are visible in restaurants, stores, grocery departments and hospital units. The evidence is strongest for attitudes and weakest for actual departures, and future research should close that gap. For Christian leaders, the findings offer both encouragement and a caution: the way of service is good for people and organizations alike, but it must be practiced as service, not as a retention tactic.

References

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Dees, R. F. (2013). Resilient leaders: The resilience trilogy. Creative Team Publishing.

Ehrhart, M. G. (2004). Leadership and procedural justice climate as antecedents of unit-level organizational citizenship behavior. Personnel Psychology, 57(1), 61-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2004.tb02484.x

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

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