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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between leader humility and employee well-being. Based on social information processing (SIP) theory and previous literature concerning leader humility, this paper identifies employee humility as the mediator and suggests that perceived leader effectiveness moderates these relationships.

This study employed a survey involving 228 employees to test the hypothesized moderated-mediation model.

Leader humility is positively related to employee well-being. Employee humility mediates leader humility and employee well-being, except for emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the effect of leader humility on employee humility and the indirect effect of leader humility on employee job satisfaction and work engagement are stronger under high perceptions of leader effectiveness.

Based on the framework of SIP theory, this paper contributes to the literature on humble leadership and employee well-being by treating employee humility as the mechanism and perceived leader effectiveness as the moderator. Few previous studies have investigated the influence of leader humility on employee well-being.

The authors examined the relationship between leader humility and employee organizational deviance. They also tested the mediating effects of personal sense of power and the moderating effects of organizational identification on this relationship.

The authors tested their hypotheses using a sample of 186 employees from an information technology (IT) enterprise in China. They used hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analyses to test for direct and indirect relationships.

Sense of power mediated the effect of leader humility on organizational deviance and organizational identification moderated the effect of sense of power on organizational deviance. In addition, organizational identification mediated the indirect effect of leader humility on organizational deviance via sense of power. Thus, employees who demonstrate high organizational identification may not conduct organizational deviant behavior, even if they have a high sense of power.

Organizations should explore and practice effective leader humility. Selection and training programs should be developed to choose humble leaders and teach them how to exhibit moderate humility.

The authors contribute to the literature by revealing the negative effects of leader humility in Chinese culture. They find support for their hypotheses that employee sense of power mediates the relationship between leader humility and employee organizational deviance and that this relationship is weaker when employee organizational identification is higher. This clarifies how and why leader humility stimulates employee organizational deviance.

Drawing on self-determination theory, this study explored how leader humility affected employees' proactive behavior through satisfying their psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Furthermore, based on a contingency view, this paper suggested Chinese traditionality as a significant boundary condition for the effects of leader humility.

Data were collected from 465 employees and 111 direct supervisors in China using a three-wave, two-source design. Hierarchical regression analyses and Hayes' PROCESS macro were applied to test the hypotheses.

The results indicated that leader humility positively affected employee proactive behavior through the mediating mechanisms of psychological need satisfaction (i.e. autonomy, competence and relatedness). Furthermore, these positive effects were stronger among employees with lower Chinese traditionality beliefs.

Although prior research has examined the relationship between leadership and proactive behavior, most extant studies have focused on “top-down” leadership approaches, ignoring the effect of leader humility. Drawing on self-determination theory, the present study makes contributions to both the leader humility research and proactivity literature by identifying psychological need satisfaction as the mechanism and Chinese traditionality as the moderator.

Integrating the reciprocity and equity lenses, this study explores the curvilinear relationship between leader humility and employee organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) by introducing psychological entitlement and perspective taking, and constructing a moderated mediation curvilinear model aiming to provide a more comprehensive understanding of why and how leader humility affects OCBs.

Using multisource, three-wave data collected from 261 employees and 55 supervisors in China, we adopted multi-level modeling analysis to test the moderated mediation curvilinear model that links leader humility to OCBs.

We found a curvilinear relationship between leader humility and psychological entitlement, and psychological entitlement mediated the curvilinear indirect relationship between leader humility and OCBs. Furthermore, employees' perspective taking buffered this curvilinear indirect effect.

Following social exchange theory and prior research discussing the potential benefits and drawbacks of leader humility, this study developed and tested a moderated mediation curvilinear model of the relationship between leader humility and OCBs. Our study thus provides a more balanced and dialectical perspective on understanding the effects of leader humility and enriching the leadership process model. This study also offers actionable strategies for leaders and organizations to optimize the benefits of humble leadership.

This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between the leader characteristic of humility and the informal learning of team members. It also evaluates the role of leader authenticity in mediating that relationship.

Data were collected on 518 salespeople reporting to 66 managers in a time-lagged study of a financial services firm. Generalized structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test a multi-hierarchical mediation model.

Leader humility has a significant positive direct and indirect effect on individual informal learning in team contexts, and leader authenticity partially mediates this relationship.

This study advances research on how leaders can help transform learning from a risky endeavor to a daily practice. It shows the impact of the leadership characteristic of humility and explains how humble behaviors provide a model for individual learning in team contexts. It also reveals that leader authenticity is a key mechanism through which leader humility comes to influence employees’ informal learning within work teams.

This study provides empirical support for the importance of leader humility in engendering the trust required for employees to engage in everyday workplace learning. It integrates social information processing theory with social learning theory to show that humble leaders provide critical information about the value, cost and methods of individual informal learning in team contexts. Leader humility increases employees’ beliefs that they can and do learn from working in teams because employees perceive the humble leader’s behaviors as representing the leader’s true intentions.

An exploratory instrumental case study design was used to study interactions between leaders and employees at a large faith-based nonprofit healthcare organization. The study used a four-part intervention to infuse humility into leaders’ language, verbal expressions, and non-verbal behaviors, as well as the physical settings in which the interactions occurred. The study made a unique contribution to the field of leadership education in several ways. The researcher worked closely with two leader-practitioners to develop customized leader humility programs using the intervention tool. Following each leader-employee interaction, leaders had a chance initially to reflect on the experience through a journaling exercise and subsequently to discuss the experience in a one-on-one interview with the researcher. This article shares the key findings from the study along with each leader’s unique development experience, as well as a recommendation for people who are charged with developing leaders in academic or organizational settings.

Prior studies have mainly advanced the understanding of a linear relationship between leadership humility and employee work outcomes, mediated and/or moderated by various individual, team and organizational variables. This study attempts to advance prior knowledge by investigating a potential curvilinear relationship between leadership humility and frontline service employee (FSE) performance and the role of FSE's psychological capital (PsyCap) in attenuating this curvilinear relationship.

Survey data were drawn from a survey sample of 273 FSEs working in the hospitality industry of the United States of America. Hierarchical linear regression analysis was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results uncover the existence of a tipping point in the relationship between leader humility and FSE performance; that is, humble behaviors expressed by leaders positively influence FSE performance up to the tipping point beyond which FSE performance starts to diminish. However, this curvilinear effect is attenuated when FSE's PsyCap is high but not when it is low.

The findings provide service managers with insights into the importance of balancing their humble behaviors to yield optimal FSE performance. Furthermore, the paper points to the need for FSE's PsyCap cultivation within service firms so that FSEs are less dependent on their supervisors and can deliver highly satisfactory results.

This research is one of the very first to investigate the curvilinear relationship between leader humility and FSE performance and the moderating role of PsyCap in attenuating the curvilinear effect.

Despite the strong focus on virtues in firms, humility is little recognized in the management literature and, more particularly in the literature about knowledge sharing (KS). Despite efforts to foster KS among employees in firms, the effectiveness of this process narrows down to the dyadic relationship between the knowledge seeker and provider within firm. This paper aims to investigate the role of humility in the KS process in dyadic activity.

The authors undertake an exploratory investigation to fill some of the gaps found in the literature. The paper draws insights from psychology, history, religion, current events and management literature.

The authors identify several individual propensities that help predict humility towards sharing knowledge from seeker (humble knowledge-inquiry) and provider perspectives (humble response). They propose a new conceptual process model of KS with humility as an important variable to consider. This work highlights several promising directions for future research.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the role of humility in knowledge sharing from dyadic perspective. The authors also introduce concepts of humble knowledge inquiry and humble response in a dyadic context for effective knowledge sharing process.

Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate high involvement work practices (HIWP) as an antecedent to burnout with a mediating role of perceived work–family (WF) imbalance. Moreover, this study examines whether humble leadership moderates the relationship between HIWP and WF imbalance.

Using a time-lagged survey approach, data are collected from 200 employees working in the Indian services sector organizations.

The findings demonstrate that HIWP has a direct negative effect on burnout and an indirect effect via WF imbalance. Also, humble leadership moderates the relationship between HIWP and WF imbalance.

By studying the pessimistic view of HIWP in the Indian context, this study contributes to the scant studies available on its effect on burnout in collectivistic societies. Furthermore, humble leadership's moderating role in the relationship between HIWP and WF imbalance is unique to this study.

Humility as an important factor for leaders was identified by Collins (2001) and his colleagues in an extensive research project about the leadership qualities of the leaders of companies that transitioned from “good” to “great.” This paper is an empirical study of six factors closely associated with humility and leadership and the purpose of this paper is to identify how Chinese business students and Chinese employees perceive the importance of six factors associated with humility as enlightened leadership.

This paper summarizes recent research about humility and leadership and suggests seven hypotheses about the importance of six factors associated with humility as enlightened leadership.

This study confirms that Chinese respondents affirmed the value of all six factors and identified the statistical significance of three of the factors studied.

A limitation of this study is that it is exploratory in nature and contained many factors that made conducting factor analysis indeterminable. The practical implications of this study are that it provides confirming information about understanding the value system and priorities of Chinese employees and future workers when multi-national companies interact with Chinese partners.

This study provides valuable information about the six factors associated with humility as enlightened leadership. This study is the first of its kind that empirically tests Chinese attitudes associated with humility and leadership.