Servant leadership and career success: the effects of career skills and proactive personality

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of servant leadership on followers’ subjective career success and the mediating role of career skills. The moderating effect of followers’ proactive personality is also investigated.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper collected two-wave matched data from 283 employees of an IT company. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.

Findings

Servant leadership has a positive effect on career satisfaction and perceived employability through career skills. In addition, proactive personality moderates the association between servant leadership and career skills, such that the relationship is stronger when proactive personality is high. Proactive personality also moderates the indirect effect of servant leadership on career satisfaction and perceived employability.

Practical implications

The findings suggest that organizations should select and train leaders to practice servant leadership to enhance employee subjective career success.

Originality/value

This is the first study to investigate the mechanism and boundary conditions of the association between servant leadership and employee subjective career success.

Citation

Wang, Z., Yu, K., Xi, R. and Zhang, X. (2019), "Servant leadership and career success: the effects of career skills and proactive personality", Career Development International, Vol. 24 No. 7, pp. 717-730. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-03-2019-0088