Why humility is vital to effective humanitarian aid leadership: a review of the literature

Abstract

Organisational scientists are paying increasing attention to humility, following a larger trend in scholarship highlighting the relational and interdependent nature of leadership and business. A growing body of evidence identifies humility as vital to effective organisational leadership, facilitating positive organisational outcomes, such as lower voluntary turnover and greater follower job satisfaction. To date, research on the subject has focused on certain specific organisational contexts, including businesses, hospitals, and schools. This paper reviews the existing literature and explores why humility may be an especially important leader trait in international humanitarian aid organisations and relief work-a context that is not only uniquely challenging, but also one that would seemingly stand to benefit keenly from the quality. It argues that humility is essential for effective leadership because it is normative of good character, it is predictive of positive outcomes, and it corresponds to a genuine representation of the nature of humanitarian aid.

High involvement work practices often lead to burnout, but thanks to humble leadership

“…As expected, humble leadership's moderating effect is supported (H3), extending our understanding of the relationship between HIWP and WF imbalance. The results support already published work and further strengthen the belief that employee's well-being via positive leadership is a longterm management development initiative to be taken up seriously to ensure sustainable organization (Wang et al, 2020). Previous research also suggests that positive leadership is a moral support resource that can trigger positive feelings and actions among employees (Inceoglu et al, 2018).…”

“…There is evidence that positive leadership can counter WF imbalance (Lyu et al, 2019;Kwan et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2017). However, humble leadership practices encountering the HIWP and WF imbalance perceptions are interesting interventions in existing literature (Wang et al, 2020). Based on Hobfoll's (1989) conservation of resource (COR) theory, we foresee humble leadership to buffer the relationship between HIWP and WF imbalance.…”

“…This study also stretches epistemological boundaries of humble leadership as a workplace practice by investigating its moderating role. A close reading of the recent review of humble leadership suggests that it is missed in recently held studies (Wang et al, 2020).…”

Growth after Trauma: The Role of Self-Compassion following Hurricane Harvey

“…Rather than understanding that the trauma (i.e., natural disaster) was an act of nature outside one's control, an individual may resist viewing the disaster through a self-compassionate lens: unable to reduce selfjudgment, isolation, and the rumination of negative thoughts and feelings [18]. Altogether, these tendencies are a barrier to adaptive cognitive processing of the traumatic event and hinder accurate self-appraisal-a disposition salient to successfully navigating natural disasters [35]. Subsequently, a person may be unable to display self-compassion and continue to blame oneself for the incident, believing that one's actions played a role in the natural disaster.…”

Saints and witnesses: Virtue and vocation in the memorialization of the Western conflict journalist

“…. predictive of positive outcomes’, is collaborative, and as striving for the common good (Wang et al, 2021). Either way, his memorial page solely promotes the Christopher Allen Prize for Writing as its main project, which quotes Allen as seeking to be ‘as close as possible’ to war, not to see it ‘from some proverbial hill’.…”