Why Humble Leaders Are Effective? A Self-Expansion Perspective

Leader humility has received much attention in recent organizational research. Although the effectiveness of leader humility has been examined from several studies across multiple levels, the core questions about why followers recognize leader humility as an effective leadership style and when this positive effect would be strengthened are still undiscovered. Drawing from self-expansion theory, we proposed and examined a theoretical model in which leader humility would trigger followers’ self-expansion process through their inclusion of leader in self. This psychological change of followers would then enhance their self-efficacy and eventually benefit their task performance. Moreover, we also anticipated that the relationship between leader humility and follower inclusion of leader in self was strengthened when they shared age and gender similarity. Adopting a time-lagged and leader-follower matching research design, we examined our hypotheses based on a data composed by 57 leaders and 256 followers and r...