Drawing on social learning theory and integrating the literatures on servant leadership and trickle-down effects, we test a dynamic model in which changes in organizational leaders’ servant leadership are related to changes in the servant leadership displayed by team leaders who report to organizational leaders. We collected three-wave longitudinal data with repeated measures from 52 organizations, 234 teams, and 1,063 employees over a 12-month period. Our two-level latent growth modeling results supported the hypotheses. Specifically, we found that changes in organizational leaders’ servant leadership have a positive indirect effect on changes in team leaders’ servant leadership, as mediated by changes in role model influences. Furthermore, changes in team leaders’ servant leadership are positively related to changes in team creativity. Our findings highlight the role modeling process that explains the learning and propagation of servant leadership in organizations. We unpack the mechanism through which organizational leaders can influence team creativity, shedding light on the organization-team interface that affects team creativity.
