How Does Servant Leadership Relate to Employees’ Work and Family Domains: The Role of FSSBs and Context

How does servant leadership trickle-down to impact subordinates’ work and non-work outcomes? The aim of this study is to explore mechanisms and boundary conditions of how servant leadership unfolds to shape subordinates’ work performance and satisfaction in relation to their work-family balance. We introduce two sequential mechanisms (FSSBs and work engagement / home well-being, respectively) and a contextual condition (i.e., POS) to address whether and how servant leaders shape subordinates’ family lives (i.e., their work-family balance satisfaction) and work performance. Using matched supervisor – subordinate data (N = 770) collected in a company in Chile, our results from multi-level analyses support our hypotheses and reveal unexpected findings. We contribute to servant leadership and FSSBs research in three ways 1) introducing and discussing two separate and sequential mediating mechanisms to understand the trickle-down effect, 2) emphasizing the compensatory role of POS in unpacking when the trickle-down effect occurs and 3) highlighting the need to bridge the two separate bodies of research, namely servant leadership and FSSBs, to develop interventions in organisations.