The interplay between servant leadership, psychological safety, trust in a leader and burnout: assessing causal relationships through a three-wave longitudinal study

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented psychological challenges for frontline healthcare workers, especially nurses, causing anxiety and depression leading to burnout. The responsibility of healthcare leaders has increased manyfold to deal with such challenges. This study attempts to employ the conservation of resources theory to examine the relationship between servant leadership and nurses’ burnout, with the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating effect of trust in leader. A three-wave longitudinal design was employed for data collection from 1204 nurses from 27 hospitals in China. The partial least squares structural equation modeling technique was used for data analyses with SmartPLS version 3.2.8. The findings endorse that servant leadership at time 1 significantly reduces nurses’ burnout measured at time 3 through the mediating role of psychological safety measured at time 2, and that a higher level of trust in the leader enhances the impact of servant leadership in reducing nurses’ burnout.

Keywords:

• burnout
• servant leadership
• psychological safety
• trust in the leader
• conservation of resources theory

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of the office of the director, Medical Research Institute (MRI)/Frontier Science Center for Immunology and Metabolism at Wuhan University to reach out to the intended respondents, and the help of Prof. Zhao Fuqiang, Prof. Ma Ying, Prof. Qin Yuan Jian and Dr Hu Wei of the school of management, Wuhan University of Technology, in facilitating the data collection process with the help of their alumni and network of friends. This study was not pre-registered.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics and informed consent

The researchers met the hospital administration to explain the academic nature of the study and obtained approval to proceed with this study. The questionnaire included a clear statement assuring participants of complete anonymity and confidentiality, explaining they had the right to withdraw anytime during the study and that proceeding to fill in the questionnaire shall deem their informed consent. The study was not invasive, did not involve any intervention or manipulation of the human subjects and participants were not vulnerable to any physical or psychological harm.

Data availability

The data for the current study are not publicly available due to restrictions by Wuhan University of Technology (a public university), the lead author’s initial affiliated institution at the time of conducting this research.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by the Independent Innovation Research Fund , Wuhan University of Technology [Grant Number 2020IVA079].