No Single Formula: Configurational Pathways to Sustainable NGO Project Success Under Servant Leadership

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) routinely invest in servant leadership, a follower-centered and ethically grounded approach to leading, as a driver of project performance. Yet whether servant leadership is necessary for success, or whether strong team dynamics can compensate for its absence, remains unclear. Using cross-national data from 451 NGO project participants and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we examine how servant leadership, team identification, and team climate combine to produce sustainable project success. Three distinct routes emerge. Two involve servant leadership: one in which leadership strengthens team cohesion (Relational Alignment), and one in which leadership reinforces the team’s evaluative climate (Structured Empowerment). A third route achieves success through strong team identification and team climate alone, without servant leadership (leadership substitution). This pathway carries the highest consistency score, making it the most reliable route to success. Project failure follows a different logic, requiring the simultaneous weakening of at least two conditions rather than any single deficit alone. Career stage also matters: servant leadership alone is sufficient for junior staff, whose team-level resources are still developing, while senior staff exhibit a more heterogeneous success landscape with no dominant pathway. These findings reposition servant leadership as one of several sufficient configurations and offer managers guidance for differentiating leadership investment across organizational levels.