Servant Leadership Style and Employee Voice: Mediation via Trust in Leaders

Noor Hassan, Junghyun Yoon () and Alisher Tohirovich Dedahanov
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Noor Hassan: School of Business, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan 38541, Republic of Korea
Junghyun Yoon: School of Business, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan 38541, Republic of Korea
Alisher Tohirovich Dedahanov: Department of International Business Management, Tashkent State University of Economics, Tashkent 100066, Uzbekistan

Administrative Sciences, 2025, vol. 15, issue 3, 1-24

Abstract: Servant leadership has been identified as extremely important for organizational performance and success; therefore, much focus is placed on developing and maintaining leaders’ positive attitudes and behaviors toward their subordinates. Different servant models have been put out by earlier scholars. Nevertheless, only a small number of studies have focused on employee voice as a key precursor to servant leadership. The goal of this study is to look at the impacts of servant leadership style on employee voice by focusing on the mediating role of trust in a leader. Time-lagged data were gathered from 336 employees of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Pakistan. The perceived servant leadership style was positively and significantly associated with employees’voices mediated by trust in leaders. This study upgrades the comprehension of the components underlying the servant leadership and employee voice model by recognizing the intervening role of trust in the leader. Nonetheless, the survey design was not longitudinal, which restricts the study’s capacity to affirm causality. The results of this study acknowledge that servant leadership style and trust in leaders can promote constructive employee voice behavior. This study addresses the unproven mediating procedure of the link between servant leadership style and employee voice and offers new bearings for servant leadership and employee voice research, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored before.

Keywords: servant leadership; trust in leader; employee voice; SMEs Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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