An Examination of the Light and Dark Antecedents of Servant Leadership

This research seeks to identify personality antecedents that lead to servant leadership. Using three waves of multi-source, multi-level data obtained from 151 employees from 39 teams in a large Australian transportation firm, we found that leader’s pro-social motivation and Machiavellianism positively predicted servant leadership behaviors and leader’s narcissism and psychopathy were negatively related to servant leadership behaviors. However, the leader’s core self- evaluation and moral attentiveness were not related to servant leadership behaviors. In addition, we found that servant leadership increases employees’ duty orientation and reduces their interpersonal workplace deviant behaviors.