Haoying (Howie) Xu is a current Ph.D. student in the OB/HR Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Before joining UIC, Howie completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in management, with a specialization in Human Resource Management, in the Business School at the Central University of Finance and Economics (located in Beijing, China). He learned the concept of servant leadership and was deeply attracted by it when he was an undergraduate student. Since 2014, he has been working with his Chinese supervisor, Professor Zhen Wang, on several servant leadership projects. For example, they investigated the trickle down process of servant leadership—a core tenet of servant leadership theory as proposed by Greenleaf, illustrating how and when higher managers’ servant leadership influences supervisors’ servant leadership, with a subsequent effect on frontline employees’ service performance. Later, Howie went to the Business School at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and worked as a research assistant in the Department of Management. He worked with Professor Dora C. Lau on a project on trust, which is a research topic closely related to servant leadership. His research experience accumulated over the last four years lays a solid foundation for his Ph.D. study and career development as a researcher.
Howie was attracted to UIC because of his intense interest in servant leadership and Professor Robert C. Liden’s strong expertise in this research field. Currently, his major research interests are servant leadership, leader-member exchange (LMX), employee volunteering, and team dynamics. His work on servant leadership or other related topics (e.g., ethical leadership) has been published in the Human Relations and the Journal of Business Ethics journals, as well as accepted for presentation at the previous and upcoming Academy of Management annual meeting. Beyond these publications and conference papers, Howie is now working with Professor Liden on several servant leadership projects. For example, one of their projects investigates the implications of servant leadership for leaders, presenting a comprehensive understanding of what impacts servant leadership has on leaders, and explicating why, how and when the impacts occur. Besides, Howie also has active collaborations with Professor Sandy Wayne, Professor Don Kluemper, Professor John Lynch, and several current students and graduates—e.g., Jia (Jasmine) Hu—of the OB/HR PhD program at UIC – many of these involve servant leadership.
Being a scholar loyal to servant leadership research, Howie tries to be a serving person in daily life as well. Howie is always available to help current Ph.D. students in the program with statistics and data analysis (e.g., multilevel modeling, polynomial regression). He has also volunteered to show the new Ph.D. students around the campus, introduce to them the Ph.D. life at UIC, the surroundings of UIC, the housing, and so forth. He is very happy when others’ difficulties in life and study get addressed with his help and serving. Engaging in servant practices, Howie has a more thorough understanding of the concept of servant leadership; and it, in turn, makes him more interested in and devoted to servant leadership research. Howie hopes that through his and other scholars’ research efforts, servant leadership theory can be developed in a more complete way, followed by more and more practitioners advocating this leadership style in organizations.