When Humble Leaders Enhance Employee Job Crafting: The Role of Gender and Trust in Leaders

The study aimed to investigate the main effect of leader humility on job crafting and the potential three-way interaction effect between leader humility, trust in leaders, and gender on job crafting. Data were collected from 158 employees in two organizations in South Korea. In order to analyze the proposed hypotheses, we used hierarchical regression analysis and PROCESS macro (Model 3) in SPSS with 5,000 bootstrap samples. The results revealed that leader humility influences job crafting, and the impact of leader humility on task crafting depends on the level of trust. In particular, higher trust between a leader and employee indicates a more positive relationship between leader humility and the employee’s task crafting behaviors. Furthermore, a moderated moderation effect was discovered of gender on the two-way interaction effect. The results of this study highlight that leader humility plays an important role for employees’ job crafting behavior particularly when they have highly trusting relationships with their leaders. In addition, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of leader humility’s effect on job crafting by investigating the role of gender.