A Study on Effect of Servant Leadership and Perceived Organizational Support on Characteristics of Agile Organizational Culture

Abstract

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this study was to identify factors of leadership and organizational support that have effect on establishing the characteristics of agile organizational culture adopted recently by many organizations as a way to deal with rapidly changing market.

Methods/Statistical analysis: A research model was developed, based on previous studies, by selecting Empowerment, Use of Collective Intelligence, and Continuous Learning, selected as Characteristics of Agile Organizational Culture, and Servant Leadership and Perceived Organizational Support (POS) as the influencing variables. The relationships among variables were identified using regression analysis and mediating effect analysis. The subjects were workers working at headquarters of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation and the Agribusiness Group. The questionnaire survey was conducted for about one month from Jan., 2020 and a total of 157 valid samples were obtained. SPSS (Ver. 22.0) was used in statistical analysis.

Findings: The results showed that the Servant Leadership has statistically significant effect on Empowerment and Use of Collective Intelligence but not on Continuous Learning which are Characteristics of Agile Organizational Culture. The Perceived Organizational Support (POS) has statistically significant effect on all of the Characteristics of Agile Organizational Culture: Empowerment, Use of Collective Intelligence, and Continuous Learning. The results of mediating effect analysis showed that POS partially mediated the effect of Servant Leadership on Empowerment and Use of Collective Intelligence and fully mediated the effect on Continuous Learning. The results suggested that, for the establishment of agile culture in an organization, it is very important to exercise Servant Leadership, which is a leadership that maximize the potential of the members of the organization based on the spirit of human respect, and to give to members the perception of the full support and rewards provided by organization.

Improvements/Applications: This study was conducted for employees working at a specific organization therefore it is difficult to generalize the results to overall industries and organizations. In the future, it is necessary to expand sample population and to conduct comparative studies between groups that have introduced agile organizational culture and ones that does not. It is also recommended to conduct additional studies on the factors of leadership and organizational support that have effect on the characteristics of agile organizational culture.