You Humble, I Proactive: Effects of Leader Humility on Employee Proactive Work Behaviors from the Theory of Planned Behavior

Research Interest
Abstract: Current literature on leader humility mainly emphasizes how a humble leader fosters followers’ positive responses, which omits employees’ initiative in this supervisor-subordinate relationship. To understand how employees actively sensitize their working context with a humble leader, we focus on employees’ future-oriented proactive work behaviors (PWB) and explore whether and exactly how employees behave proactively if they work with a humble leader. Drawn on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we propose that the impacts of leader humility on employees’ PWB work through three mechanisms in TPB: fostering a positive attitude, forming a supportive norm, and empowering a perception of control toward PWB, which in turn contributes to employees’ intention toward PWB and finally leads to their proactive actions. A three-wave multi-source field study of 199 supervisor-subordinate dyads is used to test our hypotheses. The statistical results show that leader humility indirectly affects employees’ intention toward PWB and thereby their proactive work behaviors through fostering employees’ positive attitude and their perceived control with regard to PWB but not through a supportive norm for PWB.