How do humble people mitigate group incivility? An examination of the social oil hypothesis of collective humility.

The present study explores the "social oil" function of humility at the workgroup level. Specifically, we examine collective humility, which reflects observable and consistent patterns of behavioral regularities exhibited by teams, as an explanation for linking group humility composition to reduced group experienced incivility. Drawing on the collective personality perspective, we hypothesize that teams with a high mean on members' humility could facilitate collective humility, in turn reducing group experienced incivility. We further propose two contingency factors that influence this proposed mediation pathway: (1) high group humility diversity could neutralize the positive association between group humility mean and collective humility and (2) an elevated differentiation of group incivility exposure will weaken the negative relationship between collective humility and group experienced incivility. Relying on a time-lagged, multisourced survey from 83 professional work teams, we tested this proposed moderated mediation model and found support for our hypotheses. Our findings have implications for team building and team management regarding personnel selection for humility, reducing the diversity of humility within teams, and explicitly valuing expressed humility in workgroups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Initiating and utilizing shared leadership in teams: The role of leader humility, team proactive personality, and team performance capability.

The present study was designed to produce novel theoretical insight regarding how leader humility and team member characteristics foster the conditions that promote shared leadership and when shared leadership relates to team effectiveness. Drawing on social information processing theory and adaptive leadership theory, we propose that leader humility facilitates shared leadership by promoting leadership-claiming and leadership-granting interactions among team members. We also apply dominance complementary theory to propose that team proactive personality strengthens the impact of leader humility on shared leadership. Finally, we predict that shared leadership will be most strongly related to team performance when team members have high levels of task-related competence. Using a sample composed of 62 Taiwanese professional work teams, we find support for our proposed hypothesized model. The theoretical and practical implications of these results for team leadership, humility, team composition, and shared leadership are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record