Servant Leadership and Authentic Leadership as Job Resources for Achieving Workers' Subjective Well-Being Among...

Empirical evidence shows that leadership style is a job resource that promotes employee subjective well-being among workers of value-based organizations. These organizations try to create cultures with strong values to which employees adhere, increasing their subjective well-being and transmitting the identity values. Concretely, religious organizations are characterized by transmitting their values while they perform their services. The value-based management model of religious entities is an appropriate setting for studying the effects that this style based on values has on subjective well-being.

In organizations with strong value-based cultures, the most appropriate styles are moral leadership and, among them, servant and authentic leadership; thus, this research contributes from the theoretical framework of job demands-resources (JD-R) model to the open debate on leadership as job resource to promote subjective well-being and the common characteristics of these leadership styles.

To reach the aim of this research, a sample of workers in Catholic organizations located in Spain was used. The data was processed using partial least squares (PLS) technique.

The results show that while authentic leadership is a job resource to achieving greater well-being among workers of value-based organizations, servant leadership is merely a resource in the presence of a perceived authentic leadership. In other words, authentic leadership exerts a total mediation in the relationship between servant leadership and subjective well-being.

The main contribution of this research lies in demonstrating that servant and authentic leadership are job resources that together promote subjective well-being among workers of religious organizations. This result rejects the previous theory that defend the redundant outcomes of these leadership styles, what undoubtedly constitutes an interesting finding for the academy. These findings also complement the social identity theory, as the identity of a service entity could justify that servant leadership generates higher levels of perceived authentic leadership.