MEZIESBLOG

According to the Upper Echelons’ theory, leaders significantly influence organizational activities, and their leadership behavior influences the thinking and understanding of tasks among employees in enterprises (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). Servant leadership is a typical leadership behavior that refers to leaders exhibiting humility, lending power to employees, raising the moral level of subordinates, and placing the interests of employees above their own (Sendjaya, 2015; Eva et al., 2019). This leadership behavior provides emotional support to employees and increases their personal confidence and self-esteem and thus reduces negative effects of work stress. In our study, we propose that servant leadership reduces the negative effects of work stress on mental health in SMEs.

Servant leadership can reduce negative effects of work stress on mental health in the following ways: Servant leaders exhibit empathy and compassion (Lu et al., 2019), which help alleviate employees’ emotional pain caused by work stress. Song et al. (2020) highlighted that work stress can cause psychological pain among employees. However, servant leaders are willing to listen to their employees and become acquainted with them, which facilitates communication between the leader and the employee (Spears, 2010). Hence, servant leadership may reduce employees’ psychological pain through effective communication. Finally, servant leaders lend employees power, which makes the employees feel trusted. Employees—owing to their trust in the leaders—trust the enterprises as well, which reduces the insecurity caused by work stress (Phong et al., 2018). In conclusion, servant leadership serves as a coping resource that reduces the impact of losing social support and thus curbs negative employee emotions (Ahmed et al., 2021). Based on the aforementioned analysis, we find that servant leaders can reduce the mental health problems caused by work stress. Hence, we propose the following hypothesis:

H4. Servant leadership reduces the negative relationship between work stress and mental health in SMEs during the COVID-19 pandemic.