Leader expressed humility: A meta-analysis and an agenda for future research

Abstract

This study meta-analyzes the empirical evidence on the topic of leader humility. Our findings suggest that leader humility makes unique contributions to explaining key followers' outcomes beyond those provided by transformational leadership. We also find significant overlap between leader humility and authentic leadership, yet leader humility has incremental validity in predicting several outcomes. We analyze two theoretically driven moderators: individualism vs. collectivism, and high- vs. low- religiosity, and find that both emerge as moderating the relationships between leader humility and several outcomes. These findings suggest that when constructs such as leader-expressed humility, dispositional humility, honesty-humility, and humility as a component of servant leadership are conflated under the expression “leader humility”, the granularities inherent to each one of these constructs are hidden, with negative consequences for the validity of the empirical landscape. We conclude with theoretical implications of our meta-analysis for the leader humility literature and make suggestions for future research.