How leader humility helps teams to be humbler, psychologically stronger, and more effective: A moderated mediation model

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

The leadership literature has provided growing evidence regarding the power of leadership in facilitating follower creativity. Despite these advances, a noticeable omission in this body of research is humble leadership. The study extends previous research by developing a cross-level moderated mediation model and examining the roles that psychological safety and knowledge sharing may play in the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity. Using a time-lagged data of 328 team members nested within 106 teams, the results show that: (a) psychological safety mediates the relationship between humble leadership and follower creativity; (b) knowledge sharing moderates the relationship between psychological safety and follower creativity; and (c) the indirect influence of humble leadership on follower creativity through psychological safety is stronger when knowledge sharing is high.

How does humble leadership promote follower creativity? The roles of psychological capital and growth need strength

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop a moderated mediation model to examine the roles that psychological capital (PsyCap) and growth need strength may play in the relationship between humble leader behaviors and follower creativity.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from a three-wave survey study with a sample of 165 matched leader-follower questionnaires in China. Multiple regression analyses, moderated regression analysis and bootstrapping analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The results show that humble leader behaviors positively influence follower creativity, PsyCap mediates this influence and growth need strength not only moderates the relationship between humble leader behaviors and PsyCap, but also amplifies the indirect relationship between humble leader behaviors and follower creativity via PsyCap.

Research limitations/implications

Common method bias may still exit, although the measures of research variables were gathered from different sources and with time separation. Additionally, this study is conducted in a single cultural context, which may raise the question about the generalizability of our findings to other cultural contexts.

Originality/value

The primary contribution is building and examining a conceptual model that focuses on the potential effect of humble leader behaviors on follower creativity. Additionally, by confirming the mediating role of PsyCap, the research further uncovers why followers under humble leader behaviors are more likely to engage in creativity, and the moderating role of growth need strength found in this study also offers additional insight into that followers may differ in the degree to which they are receptive to leader effect.