Eminence of Leader Humility for Follower Creativity During COVID-19: The Role of Self-Efficacy and Proactive Personality

The purpose of this study is to understand how leader humility effectively stimulates follower creativity in the workplace during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) scenario. Relying on social cognitive and social information processing theories, this study investigates how leader humility cultivates follower self-efficacy and follower creativity. Furthermore, it explores an intervening mechanism of follower self-efficacy and examines a moderating role of leader proactive personality. The hypothesized model is empirically tested by collecting the data from 405 employees and 87 managers working in the banking sector of Pakistan. The results indicate that leader humility is positively related to follower self-efficacy and follower creativity, which improve the organization’s innovation climate and an environment for social sustainability. Follower self-efficacy is also significantly related to follower creativity. The mediation analysis shows that follower self-efficacy mediates the relationship between leader humility and follower creativity. Additionally, leader proactive personality moderates the relation between follower self-efficacy and follower creativity. This study highlights the importance of leader humility for creativity and extends the literature by explaining the role of self-efficacy. Furthermore, the findings may assist the policymakers in how a humble leader heightens employee creativity and social sustainability in COVID-19.

Leader humility and employee voice behavior: The mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies

BACKGROUND: Employee’s expression of voice needs cognitive and emotional resources to express the constructive challenge. Leader humility, with the characteristics of openness to new ideas and feedback, may provide employees with psychological resources to express their voice. This study considers work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies as psychological resources and examines their mediating effects. OBJECTIVE: Referring to the conservation of resources theory and affective events theory, this study aims to examine the mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies on the relationships between leader humility and employees voice behaviors. METHODS: This study conducted a questionnaire survey on managers and employees at travel enterprises in China. Based on a survey of 837 valid questionnaires, participants provided their perception for the proposed research model. RESULTS: The results show that enhancing work engagement and controlled emotion regulation strategies and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies partially mediate the relationships between leader humility and employee’s prohibitive voice. CONCLUSIONS: Enhancing work engagement and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies have the mediating effects. However, controlled emotion regulation strategies and promotive voice need much psychological resources, employee adopting controlled emotion regulation doesn’t affect promotive voice and have mediating effects significantly.

Stay Humble and Fly High: The Roles of Subordinate Voice and Competitive Work Context in the Linkage Between Leader Humility and Career Success

This study examines the relationship between leaders’ humility and their career success. We propose that humble leaders are more likely to occupy central positions in their subordinate teams’ voice networks where they improve their own performance and gain favorable reward recommendations. We also argue that in seemingly disadvantageous competitive work contexts, humble leaders become more central in the team voice network and increase their career prospects. We found support for these hypotheses in a multisource field study of 116 supervisors, 461 subordinates, and 34 shop managers from a Chinese company and in a vignette-based experiment with 233 working adults. Theoretical and practical implications for career success, leader humility, and voice literature are discussed.

Bad time to be humble! When and why leaders should not be humble

PurposeAlthough leader humility is generally considered a positive leadership behavior, this study aims to examine when the positive influences of leader humility are likely weakened.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from a two-wave survey. Ordinary least squares regression analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses.FindingsAlthough leader humility is positively related to perceived leader support, this relationship is weakened when the environment is uncertain, resulting in comparatively lower follower performance.Practical implicationsLeaders should be aware that environmental constraints may weaken the desired outcomes of humility and therefore adapt leadership to situational needs.Originality/valueContrasting to predominant research on leader humility, this study examines a critical boundary condition by which its positive influences are compromised. In light of the disruption caused by the ongoing COVID-19, this study suggests that what usually are considered positive characteristics of leader humility are likely perceived as little leader support when the environment is uncertain. Findings of this study echo contingency leadership theories, which suggest that effective leadership should be context-dependent.