Leadership Style Training and Employee Engagement: A Qualitative Case Study of Transit Employees Perception on the Influence of Servant Leadership Style Training

摘要

A Texas public transportation agency underwent an organizational change that involved the implementation of servant leadership training across the transit agency in hopes of improving employee engagement due to the agency's Executive Leadership Board receipt of many customer complaints regarding the service the agency was providing. The problem that was addressed in this study was the role leadership behavior played on the decline of employee engagement due to the lack of managers' leadership training and skills and the impact on customer service outcomes (Chao, 2020). The influence of leadership is significant to employee performance more so during organizational change. The purpose of this study was to explore how transit managers' servant leadership training influenced employee engagement (Kumar & Pansari, 2015). Engaged employees pass on their enthusiasm to customers so much so that employees develop and deliver better products and services (Kumar et al., 2015). According to Northouse (2016), antecedent conditions are context and culture in terms of organizational culture and power; leadership attributes in terms of traits leaders used to interact morally and emotionally with their employees; and follower receptivity of how employees receive servant leadership in terms of the impact on their engagement. Leadership training is more effective than previously thought, leading to improvements in perceptions of utility and satisfaction, learning, transfer to the job, organizational outcomes, and subordinate outcomes (Lacerenza et al., 2017). The study's research on managerial influence of the skills implemented because of leadership style training contributed to the transit agency's reduction in customer complaints and improvement in customer satisfaction.