A meta-analysis of humble leadership: Reviewing individual, team, and organizational outcomes of leader humility

Humility is a concept grounded in a self-view that something greater than oneself exists. A multitude of disciplines to date have sought to understand how humility impacts leaders, as well as the individuals, teams, and organizations they lead. Despite overlapping research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts, studies examining leader humility have developed largely in isolation with little overlap between fields. This has created a fundamental divide between micro and macro researchers who suggest that humility is conceptualized as both a mutable behavioral state and a stable leader trait, respectively. We provide a systematic review of research on leader humility at multiple organizational levels of analysis to provide linkages across disciplinary and theoretical divides. We couple our systematic review with a meta-analysis of 212 unique studies, identifying 99 population estimates for the relationships between leader humility and numerous individual, team, and organizational variables. Among all variables, we find humble leadership is most strongly associated with followers’ satisfaction with the leader and the leaders’ participative decision making. We also find humble leadership is not associated with the leader’s own job performance or the performance of organizations (when outliers are removed), but is significantly related to the performance of followers and teams. Building on our review and meta-analytic results, we call for a clearer operationalization of humble leadership, as well as for the utilization of more experimental designs and empirical controls that may begin to address the endogeneity and causal issues plaguing previous research.