Taken for granted: When servant leadership may be negatively related to OCB via psychological entitlement

Despite the plethora of studies on why servant leadership can promote organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), there is a lack of understanding of when and why servant leadership may inhibit OCB. Taking a social comparison perspective, we hypothesize that individual-level servant leadership is negatively related to OCB via psychological entitlement, and this indirect relationship is moderated by group-mean servant leadership. Results from two time-lagged multi-source studies indeed show that individual-level servant leadership is negatively related to OCB via psychological entitlement, but only when group-mean servant leadership is low. Theoretical implications for servant leadership theory and related literature are discussed.