Abstract
Servant leadership style has been positively associated to organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) by various scholars. Many studies have also explored the importance of commitment in affecting OCB in employees. While the relationship between servant leadership and OCB has been established previously, its impact in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has not been understood. This research aims to report the findings of the study on the mediating role of employee commitment on servant leadership style and OCB in the context of SMEs in Australia, as SMEs play a key role in enhancing Australia's economy. Convenience sampling method was used to collect survey-based questionnaire from 226 employees working under the direct supervision of a leader. Data were analysed using various techniques like mean, standard deviation, Pearson's correlation, multiple regression analysis, and bootstrapping method. The results from the analysis showed that only agapao love and trust had a direct positive relationship with OCB, whilst employee commitment significantly mediated the relationship between all the servant leadership constructs and OCB. The empirical evidence from this study has highlighted the importance of employee commitment in an organisation and provided a remarkable possibility for future research. This study has contributed to the existing literature by exploring the constructs of Patterson's (2003) servant leadership style in studying OCB. The findings from this study have confirmed that employee commitment indeed promotes OCB as it plays a mediating role between Patterson's (2003) servant leadership constructs and OCB. This study is beneficial to managers or leaders in the organisation considering adopting the servant leadership style particularly with SMEs.