A meta-analysis of humble leadership: Reviewing individual, team, and organizational outcomes of leader humility

Humble leadership and work–family enrichment: promotion focused and thriving

“…First, it enriches our understanding of both humble leadership and the work-family interface by conceptually and empirically integrating humble leadership with work-family enrichment. Previous studies have exclusively focused on the work-related outcomes of humble leadership (Chandler et al, 2023;Kelemen et al, 2023;Luo et al, 2022), and related studies have paid more attention to the effects of traditional leadership styles on employees' family lives (e.g. Kwan et al, 2022;Liao et al, 2016;Tang et al, 2016), our study departs from the extant research by examining the family outcomes of humble leadership and answers the calls of Li et al (2017) and Kossek et al (2023) for more research on the effects of new types of leadership on the work-family interface.…”

“…Humble leadership has been defined as “an interpersonal characteristic that emerges in social contexts that connotes a manifested willingness to view oneself accurately, a displayed appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions, and teachability” (Owens et al ., 2013, p. 1518). A burgeoning number of studies have shown that humble leadership could benefit both employees and organizations, such as fostering employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors and proactive behaviors (Cho et al ., 2021; Ma et al ., 2020; Owens et al ., 2013), enhancing individual and team creativity (Ali et al ., 2020; Tariq et al ., 2023; Wang et al ., 2017), improving job performance (Chandler et al ., 2023; Liu et al ., 2022; Owens and Hekman, 2016; Wang et al ., 2018), promoting career success (Chughtai and Arifeen, 2023), and even promoting organizational performance (Ou et al ., 2014).…”

“…Despite the fruitful empirical findings in previous research, scholarly inquiries to date have primarily documented the positive effects of humble leadership on work-related outcomes (Chandler et al ., 2023; Luo et al ., 2022), largely neglecting the family consequences of humble leadership. This is unfortunate, first, because family domain represents a critical field outside of the workplace for employees, and family life has a significant influence on their subjective well-being as well as the work domain (Zhang et al ., 2018), especially in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era where the boundaries between employees’ work and home domains increasingly blurred.…”

Why is a modest gentleman cruel and ruthless? A study on the dark side effect of humble leadership – from the perspective of low-status compensation theory

“…Therefore, in conjunction with the negative outcomes of humble behaviors described above, we suggest that the previously positive behaviors of humble leadership, such as humility, empowerment, caring and respect for others (Chandler et al, 2023;Owens and Herman, 2016) may well lead leaders to become "bad" due to some self-perception and subsequently engage in persistent and hostile verbal or nonverbal behaviors toward subordinates, which is abusive supervision (Tepper, 2000;Tepper, 2007). Unfortunately, existing empirical studies have rarely explored the negative effects of humble leadership.…”

“…Humble leadership, with “humility” at its core, is an open leadership style that combines the characteristics of breaking down hierarchies, facing oneself squarely, appreciating others and being open to learn (Chandler et al , 2023). Numerous studies have confirmed that humble leadership, as a positive leadership behavior, can effectively improve employees’ positive psychological state and work behavior (El-Gazar et al , 2022; Oc et al , 2015; Kirkland et al , 2021) and promote the steady development and overall effectiveness of the organization (Zhang et al , 2017; Rego et al , 2017; Zhou and Wu, 2018).…”