The Effect of Servant Leadership on Organizational Commitment with the Mediation Role of Trust in Managers
Babak Nemati *
Master of Leadership in Business, Trinity Western University, Vancouver, Canada.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Introduction: Organizations and managers are fully aware that they are facing a fast and complex change and this unknown movement towards the future is accompanied by the demand of people for more participation at all organizational levels and surprisingly changes the perceptions of leadership, especially in communication roles
Aims: Attention to the subject of servant leadership has increased in recent years, and various commercial, non-profit, educational, and government organizations have used the principles of servant leadership to manage their organizations. The main goal of this research is to measure servant leadership on organizational commitment with the mediating role of trust in high school principals in Tehran province.
Theoretical Framework: Servant leadership is considered as an important variable in creating understanding, developing, and maintaining trust in the organization. Also, the results of Layden et al.'s (2023) research showed that servant leadership is an important predictor for social civic behavior, intra-job performance, and organizational commitment and has a positive effect on social civic behavior.
Place and Duration of Study: The statistical population of this research is 750 employees and principals of high schools in Tehran province, and 211 people were selected by cluster method using the limited population formula.
Methodology: The research tools are three servant leadership questionnaires from the article of Wang and Zhen, 2014, Allen and Mayer's organizational commitment, and McAllister's employee trust questionnaire, while verifying their validity and then reliability using Cronbach's alpha coefficient, respectively, for leadership Servant (0.924), organizational commitment (0.914) and employees' trust in the manager (0.818) were calculated. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics (structural equations) were used to analyze the findings.
Results: The research results confirmed all the research hypotheses and showed that servant leadership has an effects organizational commitment of high school employees in Tehran province with the mediating role of employees' trust in the manager.
Findings: Since the cognitive dimension of trust is achieved when a person is influenced by educational and professional training, experiences or functional roles of a trusted person, it seems that the higher the level of education of supervisors, the more professional make them stand out and be selected from experienced people who share their positive experiences with their subordinates, ultimately, their subordinates will have more cognitive trust in them and they will consider him a worthy person for this position. Also, in this direction, supervisors should be reliable role models in performing functional roles.
Keywords: Servant leadership, organizational commitment, employees' trust in managers, Cognitive trust