At your service: supportiveness of servant leadership, communication frequency and communication channel fostering job satisfaction across generations.

The present study contributes to the conversations on the role of 'autonomy supportive' factors in employee wellbeing in remote work contexts by examining the relationships between servant leadership, communication frequency - overall and Building on self-determination theory, incorporating insights from servant leadership, telework, and media richness and synchronicity literatures, we developed hypotheses that were tested In line with expectations, servant leadership had a positive relationship with job satisfaction. Total communication frequency, however, was not related to job satisfaction. Further analyses per communication channel showed that only level 2 e-mail communication frequency was positively related to job satisfaction. In contrast to expectations, the relationships studied were not moderated by generation. We concluded that, for all generations, both servant leadership and frequent (e-mail) communication can be regarded as 'autonomy supportive' factors in employee wellbeing. Paradoxically, whereas servant leadership, considered as a human-centric leadership style, suggests close trust-based employment relationships, employees valued frequent asynchronous communication (

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The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.