The Virtue of Humility in the Workplace: Antecedents, Benefits, and Boundary Conditions

Recent research shows that humility plays a key role in improving lives in a work-setting. In this symposium, we invite a group of active humility researchers to share their latest thoughts and findings. Two studies address how humble leaders affect their subordinates. Wang and colleagues propose and find that humble leaders reduce subordinates’ counter-productive work behaviors towards the leader by increasing subordinates’ trust in the leader and perceptions of interpersonal justice. Their study represents one of the few attempts to study the implications of humility to the leaders themselves. Relatedly, Oc and colleagues show that humble leaders increase subordinate performance by increasing their authenticity while leader-member-exchange quality further strengthens such processes. Chiu and Marrone examine how humble teams affect team behaviors. They look into teams’ humility composition and find that team-collective humility increases team helping behaviors by reducing team incivility norms, and that ...