The Relationship Of Servant Leadership Behaviors And Individual Engagement

In the modern society, people have become a very important factor. All the jobs need to bedone by people. So, how to measure the performance of the individual, how to explore theunderlying causes of the individual performance improvement, there are a lot of concepts andmethods were proposed in academia. However, it is an improve thing when every individualcould work well together and the key is to engage every members in this organization towardthe vision. Currently, many research results have shown that the engagement can be used tomeasure the level of the individual’s commitment to work and organizational roles. Gallup’sresearch shows that the level of engagement is related to the business performance, productivity,and profitability indicators, as well as the engagement can predict the output variables such asthe corporate performance, profits, and customer satisfaction.Therefore, in recent years, how to improve the individual engagement has become animportant topic of study. There were many studies focus on this issue. Some research inacademic linked the engagement with satisfaction, turnover, organizational commitment, andjob performance to explore and draw a lot of conclusions for reference, but these discussionsdid not involve the leaders in organization who have the most affect on individuals.However, in the real working situation, the impact of the individual by the leadership can not beignored. Studies show that transformational leadership and the engagement of the hospitalstaffs has a positive correlation. This study focuses on the concept of the relationship between the leadership and the engagement, and continues building the foundation of the furtherresearch for the relationship between leadership style and engagement.In the traditional leadership, leaders are in a high position, working from the view of thelead of others, taking the subordinate as a tool to achieve the goal to ensure the leader’sauthority.But, the servant leaders focus on service to others, taking care the employees,customers, and team-first, they are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to meet the needs ofothers. Based upon the definition of the servant leadership, the servant leaders trust theirsubordinators and sacrifice themselves, they have open values. Therefore, Servant leadershipis more suitable for the development of the times and the equality of human nature. Thisleadership is to be advocated, and our government also proposed the establishment of a"service-oriented government" concept. This research studies college staffs as the researchobject to explore the relationship between servant leadership behaviors and the engagement, inorder to reveal how can the servant leadership behaviors help managers to understand theirleadership to enhance the subordinators’ engagement.This article use a Barbuto, Wheeler’s (2006)5dimensions of the servant leadershipmodel questionnaire, Gallup’s Q12questionnaire and UWES engagement questionnaire tosurvey the college staffs(include the university faculty and staff). The conclusion of thisresearch study is: Individual’s feature has no correlation with the individuals’ perception ofServant Leadership behaviors; Servant leadership behaviors and Individual engagement has asignificant positive correlation; engagement in the work environment and t he dedicatedimension of individual engagement also highly correlated.The innovation of this paper is to use a dedicated dimension of the work environment andthe individual engagement to measure the engagement at the same time. This study hasconfirmed the correlation between two of them, and confirmed the correlation of ServantLeadership behaviors and Engagement through empirical research. Therefore, this researchstudy has not only to make up for the theoretical blank, but also to provide a different directionfor the future research.