Leadership beyond Narcissism: On the Role of Compassionate Love as Individual Antecedent of Servant Leadership

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments to author(s)

I have now finished reviewing the manuscript “How Compassionate Love Relates to Servant 2 Leadership: Results from a Field Study in Germany”.

The authors present a mediation model in which leader compassionate love is expected to predict servant leadership behavior through the mediating mechanism of virtuous attitudes.The methodology of the paper consists of a cross-sectional survey using 170 (?) leader-follower dyads from various organizations operating in Germany. The major finding was that compassionate love predicted humility which, in turn, predicted specific servant leader behaviors (empowerment, authenticity, stewardship). The contributions to theory and practice would appear to be the facilitation of a better understanding of the precursors to servant leadership and related mechanisms.

I read the paper with great interest. The examination of compassionate love as a potential route to servant leadership has great merit. At the same time, however, I do have a number of substantial reservations as well. In what follows, I explain my concerns and suggestions in more detail. For ease of processing, I have numbered my comments. Please see my suggestions as anything but developmental.

Comment #1

In my view, the introduction gives a somewhat disconnected description of the intended goals and contributions of the study. You seem to focus on gaps (i.e., no empirical research has so far looked at compassionate love) instead of the value of filling this gap. In other words, your introduction would benefit from presenting and focusing on a compelling research problem or question that we have yet to understand or more fully explore. The concepts under investigation should then logically result from the research problem (i.e., what is the problem in existing knowledge and why is it important to address it?). Why did you choose this set of variables? What are its merits and what advantages does it confer in answering the particular questions you are posing?

Comment #2

Related to the above: Later in the paper you introduce narcissism rather out of the blue. It is important that all of your focal variables are included based on theoretical justification. Why is narcissism important in your model? What role does narcissism play in the prediction of servant leadership in combination with compassionate love? I would find it more interesting so see the incremental value of compassionate love relative to positive personality traits (such as honesty humility).

Comment #3

While hypothesis 1 is rather straightforward, Hypothesis 2 is less developed. This part would greatly benefit from more thoroughly presenting the overarching theoretical framework (virtues based leadership, see e.g., Newstead et al., 2019) and related mechanisms. Also, your  argumentation includes some circular elements i.e., servant leadership is an inherently virtuous leadership style and thus it is related to virtues.

Comment #4

In its current version, the  methods section is patchy and somewhat confusing. I suggest you follow APA standards to more thoroughly report your procedures and sample characteristics (see APA manual). Also, it is not clear how many dyads you eventually included? Are the data nested (i.e., followers nested in leaders)? Also, please give some explanations about your analytic strategy. I had quite hard time to grasp what methods and procedure your were using (e.g., did you use items or parcel in CFAs? Did you use SEM to test your hypothesis? etc.)  

Comment #5

The use of dyads is a great asset of your design and a particularly suitable approach to investigating the relationship between leader characteristics and leader behaviors, as perceived by followers. This has nothing to do with common method bias but is inherently linked to your research question. Overall, I suggest you tackle the issue of CMB from a more pragmatic angle by using the work of Conway and Lance (2010)

Comment #6

Control variables: I suggest you either provide a sound theoretical reason for integrating them, or you leave them out (Becker et al., 2016).

Comment #7

A major concern that I have with your approach is the measure of virtuous attitudes. From a theoretical perspective, virtues are individual traits. However, you did not measure such traits from leaders but -if I understand correctly- used parts of the servant leadership measure (i.e., follower reports) to operationalize these virtues. What you basically do here is measuring different follower perceptions of servant leadership and then, rater arbitrary, treat some of them as leader behaviors and others as leader virtues. This misfit between your conceptual basis and the measurement strategy fundamentally undermines the validity of your approach. A potential way to deal with this is to either include leader self-ratings of such virtues (which is clearly the best case scenario) or you drop the mediation hypothesis.

Comment #8

Related to the above, I am afraid that some of your statistical analyses are not appropriate. While it is important to support construct validity through assessing the integrity of the measurement models, it is not reasonable to include different constructs measured from different sources in the same CFA  to assess discriminant validity (i.e., leader self-reported  compassionate love and follower ratings of servant leadership). Assessing discriminant validity makes only sense when related construct are measured from the same source.

You don’t need these analyses. What you want to show is that your measurement models work and that your measures a proper tools for capturing the study variables (yet, I believe that your virtues measure is fundamentally misaligned).

Comment #9

Your discussion would benefit from providing a more sophisticated integration of your results. This brings me back to the introduction and theory section. There, as mentioned above, you should provide a clear description of the research problem and its relevance, helping to crystallize the variables you then introduce. On this basis, in the discussion section you can outline where and to what extent your study has moved us forward from the place you left the reader at the end of the introduction (i.e., what is our new understanding of the problem after taking your results into consideration?)

To conclude, I hope my comments will be useful to you in improving your article, as you continue your research in this area.

References:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual (6th edition). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Becker, T. E., Atinc, G., Breaugh, J. A., Carlson, K. D., Edwards, J. R., & Spector, P. E. (2016). Statistical control in correlational studies: 10 essential recommendations for organizational researchers. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(2), 157-167.

Conway, J., & Lance, C. (2010). What Reviewers Should Expect from Authors Regarding Common Method Bias in Organizational Research. Journal of Business and Psychology, 25(3), 325-334.

Newstead, T., Dawkins, S., Macklin, R., & Martin, A. (2019). We don't need more leaders–We need more good leaders. Advancing a virtues-based approach to leader (ship) development. The Leadership Quarterly, 101312.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper provides and interesting analysis of the antecedents of servant leadership.

The work would be strengthened by a fuller analysis of Authentic leadership v Servant Leadership, the relationship between the two and why the study does not choose to consider Authentic Leadership as a construct.

The work would also be strengthened in its conclusions through a clearer statement of worth in terms of theory and practice. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 The paper present an interesting dimension of leadership and the construct is very well organised and comprehensive. The proposed model could be develop in other studies and could drive new dimensions of the leader settings in organisations.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf