Servant leadership: Validation of a short form of the SL-28

Abstract

Although research on servant leadership has been expanding over the past several years, a concise, valid scale for assessing global servant leadership has been lacking. In the current investigation a 7-item measure of global servant leadership (SL-7), based on Liden, Wayne, Zhao, and Henderson's (2008) 28-item servant leadership measure (SL-28), is introduced. Psychometric properties of the SL-7 were assessed at the individual level with data collected from 729 undergraduate students, 218 graduate students, and 552 leader–follower dyads from 11 organizations, and at the team level with a study consisting of a total of 71 ongoing intact work teams. Results across three independent studies with six samples showed correlations between the SL-7 and SL-28 scales ranging from .78 to .97, internal consistency reliabilities over .80 in all samples, and significant criterion-related validities for the SL-7 that parallel those found with the SL-28.