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The Impacts of Servant Leadership and Organizational Politics on Burnout: A Research among Mid-Level Managers

Burnout, as a factor related to an individual’s success, is defined as being exposed to behaviors that negatively affect performance and mainly refers to chronic stress. This research focuses on the effects of servant leadership on burnout through organizational politics. Data for the study were collected by survey method with participation of 401 employees from 49 different organizations. Obtained data were subjected to factor analysis with SPSS in order to check the internal consistency of the sample. Thereafter, by using AMOS software, confirmatory factor analysis were conducted and with structural equation modeling method research hypothesis of the study were tested. The results revealed that burnout was not emerged by servant leadership through organizational politics. Even though servant leadership is related to a change by creating a vision, this change process does not affect employees negatively because it comprises long-term plans and occurs spontaneously.


Introduction
As in many areas, information age has led to changes in leadership styles. Today's leaders, who want their followers to perform at higher levels and collaborate to achieve company goals, serve to their followers to achieve the best. Robert K. Greenleaf defined this leadership style as "servant leadership" and highlighted that for those leaders serving to followers and organizations become a way of their life.
Servant leaders encourage their followers to generate new ideas while solving organizational problems and they place importance to collective decision-making (Stone, Russell, & Patterson, 2004). Furthermore, servant leaders emphasize objectiveness for the benefit of employees and they put information-oriented working forward. Moreover, this leadership is related to environmental factors; for instance, in static and stable environments creating the culture of servant leadership is recommended (Smith, Montagno, & Kuzmenko, 2004). On the other hand, there are some similarities between transformational leadership and servant leadership such as teaching effort, respect, confidence, vision, integration, and effects on followers.
The focus of the leader is the main difference between transformational leadership and servant leadership theories. Transformational leaders focus on the behaviors of employees and organizations, and they create leader-follower commitment to achieve organizational goals. On the other hand, servant leaders focus on well-being of their followers and they believe that organizational goals can only be achieved by doing this. While the focus of servant leadership is serving to followers, transformational leadership focuses on the organization that followers belong to and eventually achieving organizational goals. Servant leaders also care about individuals instead of abstract concepts and this shows that these leaders value the contents of the processes rather than the results (Stone et al., 2004).

Servant Leadership
Although studies regarding servant leadership were revealed first by Robert K. Greenleaf in the beginning of 19th century, the concept gained its importance in '90s and created a quiet revolution in workplaces all around the world. While servant leaders increase the quality of organizational outcomes, they try to develop individuals as well (Spears, 2004).
In addition, another characteristic of servant leadership is conceptualization that means having great dreams and looking beyond the daily realities. Likewise, "empathy", "awareness", and "focus on human development" are also among the basic characteristics of servant leadership (Spears, 2004;Stone et al. (2004). Some prior studies questioned whom is served by servant leaders and which factors make leaders as servant leaders. In these studies, "being" and "doing" attributes were determined as significant features of servant leaders and these attributes comprises the leader's self-concept and primary intent. It was stated that primary intent (doing) comprehends "serving others first, not leading" and self-concept (being) comprehends "being servant and steward, not leader or owner" (Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002). It is possible to infer that major goals of servant leaders are to determine what their followers need and eliminate their deficiencies in order to create a powerful organization (Vinod & Sudhakar, 2011).

Organizational Politics
Although being an effective concept, organizational politics has taken relatively little place in the literature until 1970s. However, later studies indicate that organizational politics should be analyzed for a better understanding of organizations (Ullah, Jafri, Gondal, & Khyzer Bin Dost, 2011).
Recent empirical studies support that employees' ideas regarding organizational politics are better understood by focusing on perceived politics instead of applied tactics (Vigoda-Gadot & Talmud, 2010). The concept of organizational politics can be defined from different perspectives. While it's related to the activities carried out to achieve specified targets in public institutions, in private organizations it comprises striving to achieve personal goals instead of organization's (Andrews & Kacmar, 2001). Political struggles in organizations mostly depend on the characteristics of those organizations rather than individual differences. However, many researches put forward that situational conditions and organizational culture evoke political behaviors. For instance political behaviors can be observed when the sources of organizations diminish in time.
Some studies revealed that organizational politics prevent achieving organizational goals because it comprises functional difficulties that caused by external authorities. These external authorities benefit from conflict, power struggles, and tactical battles and they cause more complicated problems in decision-making (Ullah et al., 2011).
It can be said that political behaviors derive from mature dilemmas (Jafariania, Mortazavib, Nazemic, & Bulld, 2012), for instance in an environment where individuals tend to achieve their own goals rather than achieving organizational goals or especially in organizations where individuality is valued (Cropanzano, Howes, Grandey, & Toth, 1997). Therefore the structure of an organization should comply with legal and other regulations and cooperation within the organization should be ensured. In addition, organizations may become a structure formed from the impact of negative public and social sanctions in case of violation of certain regulations (Randall, Cropanzano, Bormann, & Birjulin, 1999). The increase in these sanctions may cause an increase in fear and anxiety and also exhaustion of individuals inside organizations . Furthermore, decisions made in large enterprises are often dictated by politics and participation in political decision-making is important as a matter of life and death (Ullah et al., 2011).
Previous findings showed that employees' perceived trust and social support have an important effect on the relationship between organizational politics and various job-related outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, stress, burnout etc.). In other words, if trust and social support are dominant characteristics in the organization then the negative effects of organizational politics are expected to decrease in time (Vigoda-Gadot & Talmud, 2010).
In this study Vigoda-Gadot's organizational politics scale was used and the sub-dimensions of the scale were determined as fair in pay & promotion, fair reward and fair opinion. For sure, the deterioration in the perceptions of fairness derives from the disparity between initially perceived justice and the results (Whisenant, 2005). The term "fair pay & promotion" means that all employees at the same level have equal pay and promotion opportunities. Similarly, "fair reward" refer to providing same rewards in terms of financial and non-financial to the individuals who perform equal. Finally, "fair opinion" states that employees are not evaluated and treated according to their ideas or opinions. The study is based on the assumption that individuals will not behave politically regarding these three conditions since those behaviors will also be restricted to external factors (Jafariani et al., 2012).

Burnout
The concept of burnout was first mentioned by Freudenberger (1974) and was conceptualized as an "occupational hazard". Freudenberger described burnout as "a loss of energy or power due to failure, degradation, and overload or exhaustion of individual's internal resources due to unmet demands" (as cited in Sağlam Arı & Çına Bal, 2008

Results
As employees' perceptions regarding their leader's persuasion and encouragement characteristics increase, their perceptions regarding the leader's fairness in organizational politics also increase thus burnout feelings is less experienced. Therefore H1a, H1b, H1c, H1d, H1e, H1f, H3a, H3b, H3c and H3d were accepted and H3e and H3f were rejected.
Despite that, relationship between leaders' visionary characteristics and fairness in organizational politics was found to be insignificant. Thus, H2a, H2c (partially), H2e, and H2f were accepted, and H2b and H2d were rejected. On the other hand, through the results it can be said that as the perception of servant leader's vision increases, burnout decreases. Another finding is that there is no significant relationship between communication capability of servant leaders and the perception of fair rewards. In addition, as servant leaders provide better communication with their followers, perceptions regarding fair pay & promotion and fair opinion were positively affected. The insignificant relationship between communication and fair rewards could be explained by emphasizing that employees generally focus on organizational practices and they care less about temporal issues such as rewards. Thus H4a, H4b, and H4c were accepted.