Organisational Communication and Servant Leadership as Interdependent Antecedents of Workplace Trust, Employee Engagement and Decision Effectiveness: A Critical Narrative Review

Abstract

Organisations increasingly attribute their capacity to retain talent, sustain discretionary effort and reach sound decisions to the quality of leadership and to the character of internal communication. Two research traditions have developed around these claims. One examines servant leadership, a follower-centred approach in which the leader gives priority to the growth, needs and moral development of subordinates. The other examines organisational and internal communication, particularly its symmetry, transparency and responsiveness. Both traditions report associations with workplace trust and employee engagement, and both increasingly assert consequences for the effectiveness of organisational decisions. The two literatures have nevertheless developed with limited mutual reference, use different measurement conventions, and rarely test whether communication constitutes the behavioural substance of servant leadership rather than an independent antecedent. This critical narrative review evaluates the strength, coherence and methodological adequacy of the combined evidence. Peer-reviewed literature was identified through structured searching of open scholarly indexes and by citation chaining, with critical appraisal focused on design, measurement, level of analysis and causal warrant. The synthesis indicates that the association between servant leadership and trust in the supervisor is the most consistently replicated finding, that the association with engagement is robust in magnitude but poorly specified mechanistically, and that claims about decision effectiveness rest almost entirely on inference rather than on direct measurement of decision processes or decision outcomes. Persistent weaknesses include construct overlap between leadership and communication measures, dominance of single-source cross-sectional designs, aggregation of individual perceptions to unit-level claims without adequate justification, and geographically uneven sampling. Confidence in the practical prescriptions circulating in this field is therefore lower than the volume of supporting publications suggests. Priorities for future work include construct disentanglement, experimental and quasi-experimental designs, direct measurement of decision quality, and multilevel studies that trace information flow from leader behaviour to organisational choice.