Servant Leadership in a Social Religious Organization: An Analysis of Work Engagement, Authenticity, and Spirituality at Work

Religious organizations represent a main part of the third sector and the social economy. Social faith-based institutions have some unique features that, in some respects, differentiate them from other entities, as they are characterized and defined not only by the services they provide, but also by how they provide them. It is part of their mission to convey the values that prevail in their institutional culture while developing their activities, being attractive to those workers who identify with their values. From this point of view, a key element of these entities’ success is that their employees feel identified with their work so that they are engaged in the institution and its values. The style of leadership exercised in such organizations is critical to fostering these attitudes and their long-term survival. This paper aims to study the link between perceived servant leadership by followers and work engagement, as well as the mediating role of authenticity and spirituality at work in this relationship. To this end, 270 workers from a Spanish Catholic organization in the social sector were surveyed. These data were processed by PLS (partial least squares). The results show that a servant leadership style by itself does not directly promote work engagement among employees of the target organization. The engagement of these workers comes through two mediating variables: authenticity and spirituality at work. This study covers a gap in the literature because although there are studies arguing that a strategy of servant leadership is critical to these organizations, to our knowledge, they do not finish demonstrating the fundamental roles that attitudes of authenticity and spirituality at work play in the perception of this type of leadership, achieving greater work engagement.