Humble leadership and its outcomes: A meta-analysis

Abstract

The importance of humble leadership has garnered attention from both researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, despite the accumulation of recent findings on the effects of leader humility, a quantitative review remains scant. In addressing this void, this study is among the first to conduct a meta-analytic review of humble leadership and its outcomes. Eighty-four correlations (N = 16,534) from 53 independent studies are synthesized. The authors found that: (a) humble leadership is positively related to affective commitment (ρ = 0.56), affective trust (ρ = 0.62), creativity (ρ = 0.39), engagement (ρ = 0.40), leader–member exchange (LMX) (ρ = 0.58), job satisfaction (ρ = 0.51), organizational identification (ρ = 0.48), psychological empowerment (ρ = 0.33), self-efficacy (ρ = 0.24), task performance (ρ = 0.33), and voice (ρ = 0.34); and that (b) humble leadership contributes a significant incremental variance beyond transformational, servant, and ethical leadership in several crucial criterion variables, providing solid evidence for the construct's uniqueness. However, humble leadership does not explain incremental variance in some criterion variables, indicating that future studies should control for the influence of some positive leadership (e.g., transformational and servant leadership). Age, gender, study design, country, and year partially moderate the correlations of interest. We discuss our findings with caution and propose future research directions.

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.…”

“…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.…”

“…Whereas servant leadership emphasizes modeling serving others rather than learning and development (Rego et al, 2017), ethical leadership externally focuses on maintaining compliance with normative standards (Kelemen et al, 2023). A recent metaanalysis also reported that humble leadership contributes a significant incremental variance beyond servant, ethical, and transformational leadership (Luo et al, 2022). Besides, Kossek et al (2023) recently noted that leadership and work-life interface literature are not well-integrated, and future research needs to focus on how new leadership impacts subordinates' nonwork outcomes.…”

“…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.…”

The impact of humble leadership on employee agility: unveiling the mediating role of employees' self-efficacy

“…Humility in leadership has gained increased attention from both researchers and practitioners, particularly in contemporary business environments characterized by rapid change and uncertainty (Chen et al, 2018;Luo et al, 2022). This growing interest underscores the recognition of humility as a crucial leadership trait in navigating the complexities of dynamic markets.…”