How teams can overcome silence: The roles of humble leadership and team commitment

Abstract

Team performance can be eroded or undermined when team members intentionally withhold information, such as suggestions for improvements, or concerns about issues that matter for the team. Yet, we know very little about whether silence in teams (team silence) in fact reduces team performance, and if it does, how team silence might be ameliorated. Grounded in social information processing (SIP) theory, we hypothesize and investigate the role of leaders as a potent social informational source to reduce team silence and in turn, enhance team performance. We further posit the role of team commitment to the organization as an important amplifier of humble leadership in reducing team silence. Across a programmatic series of five empirical studies involving experimental, multisource, and multiwave field data, we found support for the negative relationship between leader humility and team silence. Team silence also mediated the relationship between leader humility and team performance in a variety of work contexts. Findings supported that the benefits of leader humility were amplified in teams with higher levels of organizational commitment. Overall, this paper contributes new theoretical and practical insights by identifying leader humility as a preventative antecedent to team silence, with team commitment to the organization as an important qualifier of the impact of humble leadership on teams.