Self-sacrificial Leadership: A literature Review and Prospects

Because of increased external competition, enterprises are facing more volatile environment and survival & development pressure. It’s a very important problem about how to motivate followers to cooperate closely with leaders and pursue organizational goals and interests. For the past three decades, leadership scholars have paid a great amount of interests in training organizational leaders to motivate followers to go beyond their in-role obligations to contribute more to the collective benefits. Research suggests that one effective way for leaders to achieve this goal is to exhibit self-sacrificial behaviors. Therefore, self-sacrificial leadership has attracted much attention from scholars. Domestic and foreign scholars have gradually carried out some preliminary empirical research. This paper reviews systematically the previous studies on self-sacrificial leadership in the following respects. First of all, this paper introduces the concept connotation and measurement methods of self-sacrificial leadership. Self-sacrifice in organizational settings is defined as the total/partial abandonment, or permanent/temporary postponement of personal interests, privileges, or welfare in the division of labor, distribution of rewards, and exercise of power. Self-sacrifice in the division of labor involves volunteering for more risky or arduous actions, tasks, turns or segments of work in organizational settings. Self-sacrifice in the distribution of rewards involves giving up or postponing one’s fair and legitimate share of organizational rewards, such as salaries, benefits, promotion, vacations, recognition, and awards either permanently or temporarily. Self-sacrifice in the exercise of power involves voluntarily giving up or refraining from exercising or using the position power, privileges, or personal resources. There are three methods of measuring self-sacrificial leadership as for specific empirical research. This methods include scenario experiment, lab experiment and questionnaire scale. Secondly, this paper expounds the theoretical basis of self-sacrificial leadership. At present, domestic and foreign scholars have carried out the empirical study of self-sacrificial leadership based on the following theories. They respectively are social exchange theory, social learning theory, social identity theory, interpretation level theory, and emotional event theory. Again, the antecedents and outcome variables of self-sacrificial leadership are analyzed and summarized in this study. But for now, the research on the antecedents of self-sacrificial leadership is rather weak. The existing antecedents mainly include leaders’ sense of belongingness, subjectively sensed power and accountability. Compared to antecedent research, there are relatively lots of studies of outcome variables of self-sacrificial leadership. These outcome variables include perceptions of charisma, attributions of legitimacy, trust in supervisor, supervisor identification, organizational identification, employees cooperation, employee knowledge sharing, employee prosocial behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, employee proactive charge behavior, employee work performance, etc. In the end, the future directions in self-sacrificial leadership research are prospected. This paper provides the following reference for future self-sacrificial leadership research. （1） Based on the concept and manifestation of self-sacrifice leadership, future research will need to develop multidimensional measurement scale of self-sacrificial leadership, and carry out research on self-sacrificail leadership in different forms and types. （2） Future research will need to explore the antecedents of self-sacrifice leadership from the perspectives of leader personality traits, impression management and subordinates. （3） From the perspective of distal and cross-management top leadership, the scholars will need to investigate the effect of top managers’ self-sacrificial leadership on the employees’ behavior, and clarify its influence mechanism and boundary conditions in the future. （4） Future research will need to carry out the effect of self-sacrificial leadership on the outcome variables at the team level. （5） The scholars will need to reference the current trend of differentiated leadership research and carry out differentiated self-sacrificial leadership research in the future. （6） Based on the other theoretical perspectives, the scholars will need to keep on clarifying the influence mechanism of self-sacrificial leadership. （7） The scholars will need to carry out empirical study by comparing with other leadership styles in the future.