Leader Humility and Team Innovation: Investigating the Substituting Role of Task Interdependence and the Mediating Role of Team Voice Climate

Abstract

Leadership has been found to be linked with team innovation. Based on social information processing theory and substitutes for leadership theory, this paper examines the influence of leader humility on team innovation. Results from 90 teams showed that leader humility will enhance team innovation by fostering team voice climate. Further, task interdependence substitutes the effect of leader humility on team innovation through an indirect way via team voice climate. This study discussed the theoretical and practical implementations of these observations.

Humble Leadership, Psychological Safety, Knowledge Sharing, and Follower Creativity: A Cross-Level Investigation

“…The leadership literature has provided several theoretical perspectives to explain how leadership influences follower creativity, such as intrinsic motivation and social learning. However, these studies have mainly focused on top-down leadership and the bottom-up aspects of leadership have been largely overlooked (Oc et al, 2015; Wang et al, 2016; Liu et al, 2017). Distinct from top-down leadership, humble leadership is a new type of bottom-up leadership style distinctly characterized by admitting personal limitations, publicly praising followers, and maintaining an open mind (Owens and Hekman, 2012).…”

“…Distinct from top-down leadership, humble leadership is a new type of bottom-up leadership style distinctly characterized by admitting personal limitations, publicly praising followers, and maintaining an open mind (Owens and Hekman, 2012). Although early propositions have pointed to the importance of leader humility within organizations, studies toward exploring the influence of humble leadership on followers – and the underlying mechanisms involved – have only recently begun to attract attention (e.g., Jeung and Yoon, 2016; Wang et al, 2016; Liu et al, 2017; Ou et al, 2017, 2018; Rego et al, 2017; Yuan et al, 2018). Furthermore, these studies are primarily limited to the individual-level or team-level analysis.…”

“…Most of these studies have stressed that certain leadership styles, such as transformational, empowering, servant, shared, and authentic leaderships, can positively influence follower creativity. Yet despite these advances, a noticeable omission in this body of research is humble leadership (Oc et al, 2015; Wang et al, 2016; Liu et al, 2017). There has been an increasing recognition that leader humility is critical to organizational effectiveness, but only more recently have leadership researchers begun to empirically examine the influence of humble leadership on follower attitudes and behaviors, such as job satisfaction (Owens et al, 2013; Ou et al, 2017), psychological empowerment (Jeung and Yoon, 2016), and job engagement (Owens et al, 2013).…”

Humble Leadership Affects Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Sequential Mediating Effect of Strengths Use and Job Crafting

“…In a similar vein, Rego et al (2017b) also pointed out that humble leadership can increase team performance via enhanced collective humility and team psychological capital (sequential mediation). Liu et al (2017) demonstrated that humble leadership can facilitate team innovation by shaping the team voice climate. Chen et al (2018) identified a moderated mediation connection between humble leadership, identification with the leader, psychological empowerment, and employee proactive behavior.…”

Voice Taking: An Integrative Literature Review

“…For organizations or team, voice taking will promote team learning and team innovation, reduce turnover, and increase organizational effectiveness (Chen & Hou, 2016). Previous research found that voice taking is beneficial to improving decision accuracy (LePine & VanDyne, 1998), team performance (Frazier & Bowler, 2015;Liu et al, 2017).…”