Emotional Intelligence and Trust in Servant Leadership
Introduction
Confidence in contemporary business leadership has decreased following unethical actions on the part of leaders and resultant business failure. This has sparked an increased interest in the development of leaders who focus on the interests of their followers and organisations. The traditional organisational science approach demonstrates the deficit approach, which can be defined as the effort to understand and correct poor outcomes. This pathogenic perspective is gradually being replaced by a positive approach to both psychology and organisational behaviour. The focus of the positive approach is on individual well-being and coping skills to effectively deal with changes, challenges and problems in organisations and in careers. Within this framework, leadership too is being approached from a more positive perspective, for example servant leadership, spiritual leadership and authentic leadership.
A major precept of servant leadership proposes that followers will become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and more likely to become servant leaders themselves. The extent to which servant leadership fosters emotional health, organisational wisdom and self-determination provides key research opportunities to test these assertions. There also appear to be significant relationships between servant leadership and positive outcomes such as employees' extra effort, perceptions of organisational effectiveness, trust, team commitment, team organisational citizenship behaviour, self-efficacy, employees' satisfaction and experience of meaning.
Goleman has noted that emotional intelligence is at the very centre of effective leadership. The positive leadership intelligence involves not only recognising emotions in oneself and others, but also knowing how and when emotions unfold and using this to lead accordingly. For example, leaders who are capable of regulating their emotions are more likely to be adaptive and able to create an environment of trust and fairness.
Accordingly, servant leadership and emotional intelligence can be linked to an organisational culture of trust. Lester and Brower explored the relationship between servant leadership and trust by specifically investigating the influence of subordinates' perceptions of their leaders' trust in them. Their findings supported their hypotheses that subordinates' perceptions of their leaders' trust in them (felt trustworthiness) are positively related to the subordinates' performance, organisational citizenship behaviour and job satisfaction. Consequently, the authors conclude that when employees perceive that they are trusted, they will work harder, go beyond the call of duty and be more content with their work.
In positive organisational behaviour (POB) it is not appropriate to study only the impact of positive predictors without linking the latter to positive outcomes. In this study, the positive outcome is servant leadership and its associated predictors and antecedents (namely emotional intelligence and trust).
To date, there have been no other quantitative studies investigating the relationship between the constructs of servant leadership, emotional intelligence and trust in the manager. Parris and Peachey argue that servant leadership is a worthy area of study due to its positive outcomes for followers. Moreover, there is a lack of research aimed at understanding the antecedents of servant leadership behaviour.