SafetyInsights.org

This was really interesting. It explored when does leader humility lead to positive versus negative worker outcomes and why?

Leader humility is defined as “an interpersonal characteristic that emerges in social contexts that connotes (a) a manifested willingness to view oneself accurately, (b) a displayed appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions, and (c) teachability, or openness to new ideas and feedback” (p1).

Humility is almost always sold as a positive trait, but little to no research has explored the unintended consequences (not dissimilar to other things like psychological safety). Unintended consequences are in the form of worker workplace deviance, which is “voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organization, its members, or both” (p2).

How could higher leader humility lead to higher rates of workers departing from norms? They argue that higher leader humility could lead to higher psychological entitlement in workers. This is a momentary sense that one deserves special or unique treatment relative to his/her peers.

Self-serving attribution helps explain this connection. When leaders express humility with workers, it may result in workers believing that leaders treat them humbly because they are unique and are owed that benefit.

That is, “when subordinate self-serving attribution of leader humility is high, leader-expressed humility is more likely to induce subordinates’ inflated perceptions of self-capabilities and self-worth, leading to high levels of psychological entitlement … which further triggers subordinate workplace deviance” (p2).

Said differently, being treated with humility is seen by employees as a positive experience and due to self-serving attributions, are “much more likely to attribute the cause to themselves (i.e., self-serving attribution) rather than to the person who delivers this positive treatment or to the context” (p3).

They give an example of a worker receiving a promotion. The worker is more likely to attribute the promotion to their own capabilities rather than attributing the success to their leader/supervisor (who may have helped them achieve the promotion). High humility in some workers may result in inflated perceptions of self-capabilities; leading them to believe they provide capabilities to the organisation that peers cannot.

High self-worth may then lead to high entitlement, where people believe they deserve a bigger piece of the pie regardless of actual performance. And when they don’t get that bigger piece of the pie, undertake disruptive behaviours (“bad deeds”, like incivility and aggression, harming the organisation’s image, or pushing out work in order to get overtime since they believe they are owed that benefit).

Importantly, it’s highlighted that these deviant behaviours are not “driven purely by self-interest, as with many forms of unethical behavior … Entitled employees act in deviant ways because they truly believe they are owed, and their actions are simply their way to “get even” with their organization and its members. To them, deviant behaviors are considered fair responses to their work outputs although these outputs are highly inflated by their sense of entitlement” (p4).

I’ve skipped heaps of the explanatory how/why connections between humility and deviant behaviours, so you’ll need to read the full paper if it interests you.

The study used both a lab and field study among 275 full-time employees.

Results

Core findings were that psychological entitlement in workers was significantly predicted by leader humility and subordinate self-serving attribution.

They found that “when subordinate self-serving attribution was high, leader humility led to high subordinate psychological entitlement, which in turn promoted workplace deviance. In contrast, when subordinate self-serving attribution was low, leader humility led to high LMX [leader member exchange], which in turn inhibited workplace deviance” (p10).

They note that leader humility is “a mixed blessing”, where it may have many positive subordinate outcomes but can also be costly in terms of increased worker deviant behaviour via higher psychological entitlement (that is unwarranted).

Further, leader humility was positively related to LMX and this was especially so when workers valued those behaviours and also had low levels of self-serving attribution.

In my view this fits a similar theme of research which has highlighted some unintended consequences of attributes that are normally only spoken about for the positive benefits. E.g. psychological safety, which is more than likely overwhelmingly positive, but may have some unintended consequences/boundary conditions like higher unethical behaviour in certain team configurations (see link in comments for a study).

It’s said that the undesirable effects of high leader humility are most likely to occur when subordinates “attribute leaders’ humble treatment to their own uniqueness and contributions, whereas the beneficial effects (i.e., increased LMX and decreased deviance) are most likely to emerge when subordinates do not make such a self-serving attribution” (p12).

Thus, they suggest that “humble leaders should take action to reduce subordinate self-serving attribution” (p12). Examples include:

• Paying attention to the subordinates’ attribution tendencies and being more tactical when expressing humility with those who may have higher self-attributions
• Being seen to communicate humbly to all employees and being careful not to be seen to be humble preferentially to certain employees
• The consistency in humbleness of the leader may convey that it’s due to internal characteristics of the leader rather than to any individual employee

They note that this only focused on worker self-serving attributions and further research is needed on other facets, like leader self-serving attributions.

Finally, this study used an Asian sample. The authors remark that Asian background demographics may “tend to experience lower levels of self-serving attribution relative to Westerners” (p13). Thus, these results may be conservative and it’s possible that the effects of psychological entitlement, and thus workplace deviant behaviours, are stronger in the Western contexts.

Authors: Qin, X., Chen, C., Yam, K. C., Huang, M., & Ju, D. (2020). Journal of Applied Psychology, 105(7), 693–712.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000456

Psychological safety & unethical behaviour study: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/thick-as-thieves-the-effects-of-ethical-orientation-and-psychological-safety-on-unethical-team-behavior/

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/double-edged-sword-leader-humility-investigating-when-ben-hutchinson