A conditional time-varying multivariate latent growth curve model for the relationships between academics’ servant leadership behavior, affective commitment, and job performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

In our study, we investigated the change patterns in academics’ servant leadership behavior and affective commitment during and after the first Covid-19 lockdown (April 2020–August 2020) in Malaysia. Furthermore, we evaluated the influence of academics’ servant leadership behavior on job performance through affective commitment. We applied additional analyses to determine the degree to which the two former constructs are influenced by age and academic rank. To do so, we leveraged multivariate latent growth curve (LGC) modeling in analyzing the longitudinal data collected from 220 academics at three time points over a course of four months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results showed that, while servant leadership and affective commitment were stable over time, servant leadership was a driver of affective commitment and job performance. We also observed that affective commitment significantly mediated the relationship between academics’ servant leadership behavior and job performance. Moreover, we found interindividual differences in servant leadership and affective commitment in terms of age and academic rank at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. Our multi-disciplinary research is among the limited number of studies applying a rigorous, longitudinal approach to examine behaviors (i.e., servant leadership and job performance) and attitudes (i.e., affective commitment) during the Covid-19 pandemic in higher education research.