Emotional intelligence and servant leadership : a meta-analytic review

Miao, Chao and Humphrey, Ronald and Qian, Shanshan (2021) Emotional intelligence and servant leadership : a meta-analytic review. Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility, 30 (2). pp. 231-243.

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Abstract

Servant leadership is an effective leadership style that focuses on ethics and morality. Emotional intelligence (EI) is also associated with effective leadership and ethical behavior; thus, there has been a surge in studies that assessed the link between EI and servant leadership. Nevertheless, the empirical landscape of this relationship is mixed and fragmented. We undertook a meta-analysis to clarify this literature and found that (1) emotional intelligence (EI) has a significant positive relationship with servant leadership (ρ̅̂ = .57); (2) the relationship between EI and servant leadership is stronger in studies having a lower percentage of well-educated subjects, in low power distance cultures, and in high institutional collectivism cultures; and (3) We were unable to find sufficient evidence to support moderating effects of the relationship between EI and servant leadership for gender (male-dominated and female-dominated studies), age (between young and old subjects), for self-report versus follower-report of servant leadership, and across different scales of servant leadership.