The overburdened supply chain leader: Servant leadership and the challenges of a demanding workplace

Abstract

Over the past four years, supply chain leaders have faced volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business conditions. COVID-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and fragile economics have resulted in major supply and demand imbalances around the world that impact supply and prices. Each of these events has required supply chain leaders to make decisions on how to navigate these various issues, which has intensified their demands on their jobs. Not to mention that because of COVID-19, there has been a rise in awareness of employee well-being, and companies are requiring their leaders to become more empathetic with their team. These various demands have resulted in supply chain leaders resigning, citing that they are exhausted. With an understanding of the above circumstances, this study was centred around the well-being of supply chain leaders. In particular, the study focused on how these dynamic business conditions are affecting the different job demands, namely, work pressure, cognitive demands, emotional demands, role conflict, and hassles, and how this relates to exhaustion. Furthermore, the study required to determine what effect does the request by organisations for leaders to make use of empathetic leadership styles such as servant leadership have on this situation. Based on existing theory, a theoretical model was developed to look at these relationships from the 156 responses in the final sample. The study’s methodology and design were a quantitative study that is positivist, deductive, and cross-sectional. Regression tests were performed to accept or reject the two main hypotheses and their respective five sub-hypotheses. The results of the test provided insights on the various job demands, with two being significant and two being higher than the rest but not significant. In addition, the findings on servant leadership had insignificant interacting effects, highlighting the potential challenge with the self-reported measure used.