Servant Leadership and Serving Culture: Influence on Individual and Unit Performance

In a sample of 961 employees working in 71 restaurants of a moderately sized restaurant chain, we investigated a key tenet of servant leadership theory—that servant leaders guide followers to emulate the leader's behavior by prioritizing the needs of others above their own. We developed and tested a model contending that servant leaders propagate servant leadership behaviors among followers by creating a serving culture, which directly influences unit (i.e., restaurant/store) performance and enhances individual attitudes and behaviors directly and through the mediating influence of individuals' identification with the unit. As hypothesized, serving culture was positively related both to restaurant performance…