Relationship-specific (dyadic) humility: How your humility predicts my psychological safety and performance.

A leader's expressed humility has a favorable influence on subordinates' job satisfaction, creativity, and performance. However, we know little about how humility affects one's same-level coworkers. Shifting focus away from leader's humility, we suggest that coworker humility can also produce positive effects but has a relationship-specific component. Some coworker relationships are characterized by greater expression of humility than others. Specifically, we hypothesize that when a coworker expresses a uniquely high degree of humility to another coworker (i.e., relationship-specific humility), the latter coworker experiences a uniquely high level of psychological safety (i.e., relationship-specific psychological safety), which in turn leads that coworker to perform better (i.e., relationship-specific performance). Pilot Study 1 (N = 155, in 32 teams, yielding 823 relationship-specific ratings) showed that humility has a substantial relationship-specific variance component, even in unacquainted teams. Pilot Study 2 (N = 180, in 39 teams, yielding 854 relationship-specific ratings) built on these results in a sample of moderately acquainted teams and showed that relationship-specific humility is associated with relationship-specific perceptions of performance. The Main Study (N = 133, in 32 well-acquainted work teams, yielding 555 relationship-specific ratings) tested our full model. It demonstrated that the association between relationship-specific humility and relationship-specific performance is mediated by relationship-specific psychological safety. We discuss how our findings advance humility research in the workplace by showing that a portion of humility expression is relationship-specific and stems from each employee's unique interaction with another specific person, and that such relationship-specific humility affects relationship-specific performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of organizational and professional identification on the relationship between administrators' social influence and professional employees' adoption of new work behavior.

Administrative social influence is a principal tool for motivating employee behavior. The authors argue that the compliance of professional employees (e.g., doctors) with administrative social influence will depend on the degree to which these employees identify with their profession and organization. Professional employees were found to be most receptive to administrator social influence to adopt new work behavior when they strongly identified with the organization and weakly identified with the profession. In contrast, administrator social influence was counterproductive when professional employees strongly identified with the profession and weakly identified with the organization.