Servant Leadership and Employee Well-Being: Mapping Research Evolution, Intellectual Structure and Emerging Themes through Bibliometric Analysis, Systematic Literature Review and LDA-Based Topic Modelling

Abstract

Servant leadership has emerged as one of the most consistently theorised leader behaviours associated with follower well-being, yet the field’s rapid and fragmented growth has made it difficult to discern a coherent intellectual structure, a stable thematic architecture, or a clear research agenda. This study addresses that gap by combining bibliometric analysis, a systematic literature review (SLR), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)-based probabilistic topic modelling to map the evolution of research at the intersection of servant leadership and employee well-being. Following a PRISMA-guided screening protocol, 213 English-language articles and reviews were retrieved from Scopus (search string: servant leadership AND employee well-being; 2000–2026) and analysed using VOSviewer (author, country, and citation-based networks) and Python-based LDA. The results show that publication output has grown almost twenty-fold since 2016, with 2024 as the peak year (n = 43); that the field is intellectually anchored by Greenleaf's foundational writing and operationalised chiefly through Liden et al.'s and van Dierendonck's multidimensional measures; and that bibliographic coupling of the 144 most interconnected documents resolves into six research fronts, corroborated by a six-cluster LDA solution extracted from article abstracts. Co-authorship analysis reveals a geographically broad but structurally fragmented collaboration network dominated by the United States, China, and Spain, with only 34 of 43 qualifying countries forming a single connected component and author collaboration remaining largely confined to small, closed dyads and triads. Keyword co-occurrence and topic-evolution analysis jointly indicate a thematic shift away from generic organisational-citizenship and trust outcomes (pre-2020) toward well-being-proximal mechanisms — psychological safety, burnout, work engagement, and post- pandemic resilience — as well as an emergent, environmentally-specific stream linking servant leadership to green creativity and sustainable hospitality outcomes. The systematic review further identifies conservation-of-resources theory, social exchange theory, and self-determination theory as the dominant explanatory lenses, and surfaces need-satisfaction, trust, and psychological safety as the most frequently tested mediating mechanisms. Integrating the three analytical layers, the study proposes a consolidated research agenda around mechanism-level well-being theorising, longitudinal and multilevel designs, contextual boundary conditions, and computational-linguistic extensions of bibliometric methods. The paper contributes a replicable tri-method protocol for mapping mature-but- fragmenting leadership literatures and offers scholars, editors, and practitioners an evidence-based roadmap for the next decade of servant leadership and well-being research.