Servant Leadership and Organizational Well-Being: Bridging Ethics, Empathy and Performance

Dear Colleagues,

Servant leadership has become a substantial research domain, with major reviews documenting rapid growth alongside continuing concerns about construct boundaries and measurement quality (Eva et al., 2019; Lemoine et al., 2025). Accumulated evidence links servant leadership with indicators of healthier work and organizational functioning, such as higher engagement, commitment, trust, and citizenship behavior, and lower burnout and turnover intentions, suggesting a plausible pathway from ethical and empathic leader behaviors to sustainable performance outcomes (Coetzer et al., 2017, 2025; Irving & Berndt, 2017; Kumari et al., 2022). Recent research has further advanced the field by comparing prominent measurement instruments (van Dierendonck et al., 2023) and consolidating contemporary theoretical and empirical developments (van Dierendonck & Patterson, 2025). Newer studies also highlight pathways linking servant leadership to employee flourishing and store-level profit (Giolito et al., 2021), leader strain and performance trade-offs (Li et al., 2023), psychological safety (Plouffe et al., 2023), goal clarity (Heine et al., 2023), and role clarity for organizational success (Birna D. Birgisdóttir et al., 2024).

This Special Issue, entitled “Servant Leadership and Organizational Well-Being: Bridging Ethics, Empathy and Performance,” calls for research that advances theory and evidence on how ethics and empathy (and related relational processes, such as trust) may operate as mechanisms connecting servant leadership to organizational well-being and performance. We particularly welcome studies that identify boundary conditions, and we invite qualitative and mixed-methods research that illuminates how these mechanisms are enacted and interpreted across organizational contexts.

This Special Issue extends current servant leadership scholarship by foregrounding how ethics and empathy (and related relational processes, such as trust) may operate as mechanisms linking servant leadership to organizational well-being and performance, while also engaging ongoing concerns about construct boundaries and measurement quality. In light of recent advances in theory consolidation and measurement comparisons, we particularly encourage submissions that specify clear causal models, attend to construct-operationalization choices, and use designs that strengthen inference. We also welcome high-quality qualitative and mixed-methods research that can illuminate how these mechanisms are enacted in practice, as well as how meanings and moral claims are negotiated across contexts. By integrating rigorous quantitative, qualitative, and multi-method approaches, this Special Issue will support more cumulative, comparable, and practically informative knowledge about when, how, and for whom servant leadership matters.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 300-500 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (sigrungu@hi.is; hfg@hi.is) or to Administrative Sciences editorial office (admsci@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Birgisdóttir, B. D., Gunnarsdóttir, S., & Candi, M. (2024). Exploring relationships among servant leadership, role clarity and creative self-efficacy. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 45(3), 397-422. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-12-2022-0555

Coetzer, M. F., Bussin, M., & Geldenhuys, M. (2017). The functions of a servant leader. Administrative Sciences, 7(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci7010005

Coetzer, M. F., Bussin, M., & Geldenhuys, M. (2025). Evaluation of a servant leadership intervention. Administrative Sciences, 15(11), 420. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15110420

Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004

Giolito, V. J., Liden, R. C., van Dierendonck, D., & Cheung, G. W. (2021). Servant leadership influencing store-level profit: The mediating effect of employee flourishing. Journal of Business Ethics, 172(3), 503–524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04509-1

Heine, E. C. E., Stouten, J., & Liden, R. C. (2023). Providing service during a merger: The role of organizational goal clarity and servant leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 184(3), 627–647. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05162-6

Irving, J. A., & Berndt, J. (2017). Leader purposefulness within servant leadership: Examining the effect of servant leadership, leader follower-focus, leader goal-orientation, and leader purposefulness in a large U.S. healthcare organization. Administrative Sciences, 7(2), 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci7020010

Kumari, K., Abbas, J., Hwang, J., & Cioca, L. I. (2022). Does servant leadership promote emotional intelligence and organizational citizenship behavior among employees? A structural analysis. Sustainability, 14(9), 5231. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095231

Lemoine, G. J., Eva, N., Smallfield, J., Hartnell, C. A., & Meuser, J. D. (2025). Fortifying servant leadership’s foundations: Five core questions to guide future research. Group & Organization Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10596011251376461

Li, F., Chen, T., Bai, Y., Liden, R. C., Wong, M.-N., & Qiao, Y. (2023). Serving while being energized (strained)? A dual-path model linking servant leadership to leader psychological strain and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(4), 660–675. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001041

Plouffe, R. A., Ein, N., Liu, J. J., St. Cyr, K., Baker, C., Nazarov, A., & Don Richardson, J. (2023). Feeling safe at work: Development and validation of the Psychological Safety Inventory. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 31(3), 443-455. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12434

van Dierendonck, D., Xiu, L., & Lv, F. (2023). Servant leadership measurement: A comparison of five instruments in China. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 44(3), 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-03-2022-0153

van Dierendonck, D., & Patterson, K. (Eds.). (2025). Servant leadership: Developments in theory and research (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-69922-1.

Prof. Dr. Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir
Dr. Haukur Freyr Gylfason
Guest Editors

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• servant leadership
• well-being
• empathy
• ethics
• performance