A field study was conducted to compare the three meta-categories assessed in the Managerial Practices Survey (MPS) with the “full-range” taxonomy assessed in the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). Dyadic and group-level analyses found that subordinate job attitudes and boss-rated managerial effectiveness were predicted better by the MPS meta-categories than by the MLQ meta-categories. Results also suggested that at least one of the three meta-categories from the MPS was more important in predicting each effectiveness outcome than any of the meta-categories from the MLQ. Implications germane to leadership theory and research are further discussed.
This study extends our understanding of humble leadership as an important trust-engendering leadership style that influences employee behaviors. Drawing on social exchange theory, we articulate how humble leaders’ employee-centric behaviors signal trust and facilitate a social exchange relationship between leaders and followers. Specifically, we posit that a leader’s humble leadership behaviors are positively related to employees’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior via feelings of being trusted by one’s supervisor. We also predict that the interaction between humble leadership and employee job autonomy will influence employees’ appraisal of feeling trusted. We tested our moderated-mediation model using experimental vignette data and three-wave survey data collected from 233 employees and their supervisors working at a large Chinese internet company. Study results support our hypotheses that humble leadership, and its interaction with employee job autonomy, contribute to feeling trusted by their supervisor. Furthermore, we found that humble leadership behavior, via enhanced perceptions of feeling trusted, predicted supervisor-rated employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior toward the organization. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.