| dc.description.abstract | Leadership styles and leader behaviors are some of the most studied topics in the management literature. Recently, the study of humble leadership has been gaining interest and popularity. Humble leadership has been shown to increase follower retention, job satisfaction, and performance. Although there has been prior research using leader and situational variables as moderators, there is little research on how follower traits might moderate the relationship between humble leadership and follower and organizational outcomes. It is important to understand how followers might react differently to humble leaders.
This dissertation primarily looks at how follower traits influence the effectiveness of humble leadership. I designed a 2x2 lab experiment in which a confederate, acting as the session leader, manipulated his behavior to display a humble leadership style in half of the conditions. I found that proactive employees respond better to humble leadership and that this conditional effect between humble leadership and leader satisfaction is mediated by empowerment. I also found that followers have lower task performance when their leader is both inexperienced and displays humble leadership behaviors. Finally, I discovered three-way interactions between humble leadership, leader experience level, and follower characteristics.
In the first chapter, I begin with a review of the humble leadership literature. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I develop a model and my hypotheses. The third chapter includes the analyses of my lab study. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation will be a discussion of what I have learned. Here, I will describe how my research has contributed to the leadership literature generally and the humble leadership literature specifically. Finally, I will discuss how my study has opened up avenues for future research and suggest specific future studies that future scholars can do in order to continue to move this important research stream forward. | en_US |
