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Servant Leadership Through a Gendered Lens: Role Congruity, Warmth-Competence Perceptions, and Leader Effectiveness
1Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
|July 28, 2026
Summary
Servant leadership
Area of Science:
- Organizational Behavior
- Social Psychology
- Leadership Studies
Background:
- Servant leadership is often viewed as universally beneficial.
- However, leader gender may influence its perceived effectiveness.
- Existing theories like role congruity and stereotype content model offer insights.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how leader gender moderates the effectiveness of servant leadership.
- To examine the mediating roles of followers' warmth and competence perceptions.
- To propose and test a congruity trap model.
Main Methods:
- A 2x2 between-subjects online experiment (N=298).
- A three-wave time-lagged field study with employees in China (N=194).
- Analysis of interaction effects between servant leadership and leader gender on perceptions and effectiveness.
Main Results:
- Study 1 confirmed that servant leadership and leader gender interact to influence warmth and competence perceptions.
- Study 2 showed a significant interaction for competence perceptions, but not warmth perceptions.
- Gender-contingent differences in effectiveness were primarily transmitted through competence perceptions.
Conclusions:
- Competence perceptions consistently mediate the divergent evaluation outcomes of servant leadership for male and female leaders.
- The benefits of servant leadership are not universally experienced and are contingent on leader gender.
- Gender stereotypes can lead to different evaluations of identical leadership behaviors.
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