If you have ever had a manager who quietly stayed back to help you finish your work, gave the team the credit for a win they had clearly steered, or made time for your career when they had none of their own, you have probably experienced servant leadership. But would you have called it that at the time? Would you have noticed at all?
In our recent article published in the Journal of Management Studies, we explore this question by drawing on signalling theory to examine how leaders get seen as servant leaders, and we show that good intentions, and even genuinely servant behaviour, aren’t enough. The signal must be observable, costly to send, repeated often enough to be credible, and received by a follower who’s motivated to pick it up. None of which is guaranteed.
The hidden cost of being an unseen servant leader
Twenty-five years of research, multiple meta-analyses, and hundreds of empirical studies tell a consistent story: when leaders prioritise their followers, individuals, teams, and organisations all do better. But that story rests on a quiet assumption: the leader behaves in a servant way, and the follower notices. However, the gap between the two is where leaders can get hurt.
Serving others is genuinely costly. Time spent investing in your team is time pulled away from your own performance objectives and career advancement. The colleague you mentor for two years might leave the team next quarter. Prioritising someone’s development today can create real tension with what your client needs by Friday. And a steady stream of recent research has linked sustained service to others with emotional exhaustion, energy depletion, and psychological strain. The leader pays these costs regardless of whether the follower ever registers what is happening. Thus, if a follower does not recognise their leader’s behaviour as servant leadership, the leader absorbs all the cost and the team gets none of the benefit.
Our studies: A signalling lens with three experiments
To examine how leaders come to be recognised as servant leaders, we drew on signalling theory, which explains how one party communicates valuable but unobservable qualities to another through observable, costly actions. Across three experimental studies with over 800 full-time working adults, two conjoint experiments and one video-based vignette study, we systematically manipulated the signals leaders send (their reputation, who they give credit to, how frequently they help, and how consistently they invest in followers’ development), follower characteristics (prosocial motivation), and the surrounding organisational environment (whether the firm itself was service-driven or performance-driven). In each study, participants stepped into the role of an employee at a fictional consulting firm and evaluated a newly assigned managing director across a series of scenarios. In the conjoint experiments, they read short descriptions of the manager’s reputation, behaviour, and results. In the video study, they watched the CEO, the HR manager, and their new leader speak directly to them, before judging whether the leader was a servant leader.
What followers picked up on
Three leader behaviours emerged as the clearest signals followers read as servant leadership:
- A reputation around the firm for putting employees’ careers first;
- Publicly giving the team credit for success, rather than taking the credit personally; and
- Repeatedly stepping away from your own work to help followers with theirs while making their career development a genuine priority.
When these signals aligned, followers reliably saw the leader as a servant leader. When the signals contradicted each other, such as a follower-first reputation paired with a leader who took the credit, perceptions of servant leadership dropped sharply.
For example, when participants learned the managing director was “well-known for putting their employees’ careers first” and saw that they ”gave all the credit to the team for the work product,” servant leadership ratings reached 5.76 (out of 7). When the same credit-giving behaviour came from a manager known for putting their own career first, the rating dropped to 3.36. The behaviour was identical, only the leader’s reputation had changed.
Leaders need to keep going back to the well, one off is not enough
One of the clearest practical findings: a single act of service is cheap. Five acts of service across a project, sustained week after week, is costly, and that cost is exactly what makes the signal credible to followers. Leaders who showed up frequently and consistently were rated significantly higher than those who did the same things occasionally. The “sugar bump” you get from a leadership development workshop won’t carry you past Monday. You have to keep going back to the well, every day. That’s the unglamorous life of being recognised as a servant leader.
Two people can watch the same leader and see different things
A surprising amount of the recognition equation sits with the follower, not the leader. We found that followers high in prosocial motivation, those who themselves care about helping others, were significantly more attuned to servant signals. They were more likely to interpret leader behaviours as servant in nature. Followers lower in prosocial motivation often missed the signal entirely, even when the behaviour was identical. Thus, the leader can do everything right and still go unseen.
The organisation casts a halo (sometimes a misleading one)
We expected a service-driven organisation to amplify perceptions of servant leaders, and to expose performance-first managers as out of step. The first part held. The second part didn’t, and that’s the more interesting finding. In our video-based study, participants watched a CEO and HR manager either say “our people are our focus” or “profits are our focus”, before observing a leader who was either follower-first or performance-first. When the CEO and HR said the organisation was people-focused, even a leader whose own behaviour was performance-first was rated highly as a servant leader (5.73), almost as high as a genuinely follower-first leader in the same setting (5.85). When the CEO and HR focused on profits, the same performance-first leader dropped to 4.22. The organisational frame shapes how every leader inside it gets read. The best alignment is still service-oriented leaders inside service-oriented organisations. But the halo effect of senior messaging is real, and worth taking seriously.
What this means in practice
For leaders: Servant leaders cannot completely ‘stand back’. Their behaviours must be observable, repeated, and costly enough to be credible. Pick a small set of signals (e.g., credit giving, pausing your own work to help, prioritising career development) and make them visible, often.
For organisations: Senior signalling matters more than we expected. When the messages from the top contradict each other, the leader-level behaviours underneath them get harder to read. The more coherent the organisational story, the more clearly any one leader’s signals can land.
For researchers: If the same behaviours are rated differently depending on the follower and the organisation around them, do our perceptual servant leadership scales actually measure servant leadership? Or do they measure something else entirely: follower disposition, organisational climate, halo effects, all dressed up as leader behaviour? Signalling theory and experimental designs offer a potential way forward, but we suggest that scholars think more broadly about the measurement of servant leadership.
A final thought
Servant leadership is the consistent work of putting others first. Our study doesn’t undermine that, it sharpens it. The work itself still matters. But the returns to that work depend on followers noticing, the organisation reinforcing, and the leader doing the work often enough for the signal to be unmistakable.
