IB20120300003_87546185.pdfVIP

iBusiness, 2012, 4, 208-215 /10.4236/ib.2012.43026 Published Online September 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ib) Relationship of Servant Leadership and Employee Loyalty: The Mediating Role of Employee Satisfaction Donghong Ding1, Haiyan Lu1, Yi Song2, Qing Lu3 1School of Management, University of Science and Technology, Hefei, China; 2School of Humannities and Social Science, Univer- sity of Science and Technology, Hefei, China; 3School of Business, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. Email: qiuwuhaiyan@126.com Received July 4th, 2012; revised July 23rd, 2012; accepted August 1st, 2012 ABSTRACT There is a growing concern about the relationship of servant leadership and employee loyalty recent years, but few are focusing on the intervening mechanisms between them. Especially in China, research on such mediating variables is nearly blank. In this paper, we make our attempt on detecting the role in such relationship by empirical studies through 186 samples using the structural equation model (SEM) method, and reach two conclusions: servant leadership is sig- nificantly positive correlated with employee loyalty; employee satisfaction is found to play mediating role which occu- pies 77% of the total effect between servant leadership and employee loyalty. Our result shows that, to improve em- ployee loyalty, the managers should not only develop their servant leadership style, but also take into consideration the individual needs to improve psychological satisfaction. Keywords: Servant Leadership; Employee Satisfaction; Employee Loyalty; Mediating Role 1. Introduction How to improve employee loyalty is one of today’s most difficult problems that troubles business leaders. Several ways are proposed to solve this problem, among which improving style of leadership is a key perspective, for that to some extent, leadership style determines the rela- tionship between leaders and employees [1]. Researches show that employee turnover is closely relat