Keywords

servant leadership, community citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, higher education, multi-level structural equation modeling (MSEM)

Abstract

There is a great emphasis on the importance of serving communities and the need to study servant leadership in recent higher education literature. Yet, academics’ community citizenship behavior has not been examined through applied research. To address these issues, our study aims at investigating the effects of two dimensions of servant leadership (behaving ethically and helping subordinates grow and succeed) on job satisfaction and community citizenship behavior. The context of our multi-level study is the Malaysian higher education. To estimate our theoretical model, we employed the EQS 6.4 statistical package and analyzed the data collected from 1876 lecturers from 120 departments using a multi-level structural equation modeling (MSEM) methodology. Our results revealed two completely different model structures at both lecturer and department levels. More specifically, while both the predictors were useful for explaining the outcome variables at the lecturer level, we observed that only behaving ethically was a significant predictor of community citizenship behavior at the department level. We discuss the findings in detail and elaborate on the implications of the findings with respect to policy and practice, theory, and methodology. We also address limitations and make recommendations for future research.

Original Publication Citation

Ghasemy, M., Akbarzadeh, M., & Gaskin, J. E. (2022). Being satisfied and serving communities as outcomes of servant leadership in the academic context: Policies based on a multi-level structural equation model. Asia Pacific Education Review, 23(1), 69-86.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2021

Publisher

Asia Pacific Education Review

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Business

Department

Information Systems Management

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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