The Relationship Between Servant-Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behavior Among Leadership Development Program Graduates in Uganda.

Abstract

There is a growing quest to better understand the Servant Leadership model, even while it is an established fact that Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) facilitates smooth running of organizations and improves employee motivation and retention. The researcher conducted a cross sectional study that collected data from 108 Leadership Development Programme graduates. The study focused on finding the relationship between the constituent dimensions of the Servant Leadership model (namely the Leader dimension, the Servant dimension and the intersecting leader/servant dimension); and how each dimension relates to Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) of the graduates. The data was analysed and the leader dimension of Servant Leadership was found to have a significant positive relationship with OCB, the intersecting leader/servant dimension and OCB was found to have a moderately positive relationship, while the servant dimension of Servant leadership also had a moderately positive relationship. The multiple regression analysis revealed that up to 43.9% of servant leadership was responsible for OCB in LDP graduates at the work place. From the findings, it was recommended that the graduates continuously engage in refresher courses in servant leadership, participate in brainstorming sessions and think-tanks to further refine their leadership acumens; and that their employers should ensure their graduate employees participate in corporate social responsibility activities and deliberately continuously expose them to environments that would provoke humanitarian action. The empirical evidence established by this study gave credibility to the servant leadership theory and supported the idea that the practice of servant leadership positively affects organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and consequently increases the health of organizations.