Sustaining Servant Leadership in Healthcare: The roles of resilience and prosocial motivation in enhancing leader work engagement - ACHSM Asia-Pacific Health Leadership Congress in Darwin 2025

Abstract

The beneficial effects of servant leadership on followers have been extensively studied; however, the impact of this leadership style on leaders who employ it has been less well studied. Taking the support of Self-Determination Theory and Conservation of Resources Theory, this research investigates how two personal resources—prosocial motivation and resilience—shape servant leadership behaviour and, in turn, influence leader work engagement in healthcare organisations.

A cross-sectional study was conducted among 168 healthcare leaders in India. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) results showed that the four variables of the conceptual model are fairly distinct from each other, and structural equation modelling revealed that both prosocial motivation (β = 0.458, p < .001) and resilience (β = 0.375, p < .001) significantly predicted servant leadership behaviour. Servant leadership, in turn, positively predicted leader work engagement (β = 0.380, p = .001). Mediation analysis confirmed that servant leadership behaviour fully mediated the effect of prosocial motivation and partially mediated the effect of resilience on leader work engagement. Interestingly, unlike resilience, prosocial motivation showed no direct impact on engagement, indicating that behavioral enactment is necessary for converting motivational dispositions into sustained vitality.

These findings suggest valuable additions to the servant leadership theory by highlighting the behavioral tendencies through which personal resources affect leader engagement. Practically, they suggest that healthcare organisations should foster prosocial and resilient dispositions and support servant leadership behaviours through training, introspection, and relational feedback. By doing so, organizations can cultivate emotionally sustainable leadership in high-stress clinical environments.