Elsevier

The Leadership Quarterly

Volume 26, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 68-80
The Leadership Quarterly

Leader humility in Singapore

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.11.005Get rights and content

Abstract

The theoretical development and empirical testing of the effects of humility in the organizational sciences is surprisingly rare. This is especially pronounced in the study of leadership in Asian contexts. To address this we employ a qualitative approach to examine the conceptualization of leader humility in Singapore and assess whether this conceptualization differs from other emerging conceptualizations of leader humility. In Study 1, using semi-structured interviews of 25 Singaporeans, we identified nine major dimensions of humble leader behaviors and explored our participants' beliefs about culturally-based differences in leader humility. In Study 2 (N = 307), we generalized our findings to a broader sample and explored how the nine dimensions fit with existing taxonomies. In addition to replicating all of the Western conceptual dimensions of humility, we identified five unique dimensions of behaviors indicative of leader humility in Singapore.

Section snippets

Definitions of humility

Despite some recent attention to humility in the scientific literature there remains a lack of consensus regarding what humility is and is not. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines humility as the “quality of having a modest or low view of one's importance” and it is considered synonymous with “having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, lowliness” (www.dictionary.com). While some research embraces this definition (e.g., examining how humility is related to low

Theoretical role of leader humility

Several theories of leadership suggest that humility is a key feature of effective leadership (e.g., Avolio et al., 2004, Bass, 1985, Collins, 2005, Weick, 2001). For example, leaders who are self-aware, teachable, and appreciative of the strengths of others are more likely to exhibit the behaviors typical of servant leaders (e.g., remaining in the background, giving credit to followers; Morris et al., 2005). Similarly, self-awareness, one of the most commonly cited dimensions of humility (

Humility in Asian leadership

Riordan and Vandenberg (1994) warned that scholars should avoid importing concepts developed in the West into different cultural contexts and expecting them to function or be interpreted in the same way. As Markus and Kitayama (1991) convincingly argued, cultural values can shape our attributions, our behaviors, as well as what we believe to be appropriate behaviors of others. Given some of the boundary conditions discussed above, in particular the emphasis on the possible effects of strict

Overview of studies

To address the possibility that previous conceptualizations of leader humility may be deficient in general, or may not generalize to an Asian context in particular, we conducted two studies. In these studies, we sought to first understand the concept of leader humility in an Asian context (Singapore), and how this conceptualization might differ from existing operationalizations developed in Western contexts. In Study 2, we examined the extent to which the identified dimensions from Study 1

Participants

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 Singaporean participants (23 self-identified as Chinese Singaporean, 1 as Malay Singaporean, and 1 as Indian Singaporean), all of whom were either full-time MBA students, part-time students in a PhD of General Management (also simultaneously working as executive-level managers), or other full-time working Singaporeans. Forty four percent of the sample was female with an average age of 33.44 years (SD = 8.30). Participants represented different

Humble leader behavior

In total, nine dimensions emerged from our interviews: 1) “having an accurate view of self”, 2) “recognizing follower strengths and achievements”, 3) “modeling teachability and being correctable”, 4) “leading by example”, 5) “showing modesty”, 6) “working together for the collective good”, 7) “empathy and approachability”, 8) “showing mutual respect and fairness”, and 9) “mentoring and coaching” (see Table 1 for a list of labels, brief definitions, and example statements).

As can be seen from

Study 1 discussion

Although our primary aim was to compare the dimensions that emerged in this study with those of Owens and Hekman's (2012) leader humility conceptualization (given that we both focused on expressed leader humility), the nine dimensions that emerged from our data also generally overlap with the theoretical and empirical definitions found in the humility literature (e.g., Morris et al., 2005, Tangney, 2000a). Our results replicate Owens and Hekman's (2012) three dimensions of leader humility,

Study 2

In Study 2, we assessed the appropriateness of the nine dimensions that emerged in Study 1 and whether our results would generalize to a broader population of managers working in Singapore. We also compared our dimensions to existing (largely Western) operationalizations of humility.

Humility frequencies

As can be seen from the frequencies (see Table 3), each of the nine dimensions were mentioned a minimum of 29 times, (“working together for the collective good” was mentioned with the lowest frequency). However, there were some noticeable differences in frequencies, with three dimensions mentioned most often. In contrast to Study 1, the clear dominant dimension in this sample was “modeling teachability and being correctable”, accounting for 35.48% of the statements across all respondents. While

Discussion study 2

In Study 2 we replicated the nine dimensions that emerged in Study 1 with a broader sample of working Singaporeans. Similar to Study 1, “modeling teachability and being correctable”, and “empathy and approachability” were two of the most frequently mentioned aspects of leader humility, while “working together for the collective good” was the least frequently mentioned dimension of leader humility in Study 2.

In addition, there were some gender differences in the frequencies of reported

Overall discussion

Across two studies we replicated the three major dimensions found in previous research on expressed leader humility in a different cultural context (albeit with only two of our own dimensions; e.g., Owens & Hekman, 2012). The dimension of “modeling teachability and being correctable” (a dimension common to the most prominent models of humility) seemed particularly salient to the largest number of our participants. In addition, our participants identified five unique dimensions of behaviors that

Limitations and future directions

As with any study, ours it not without limitations. Given that these were two exploratory qualitative studies, our dimensions should be interpreted with caution until they can be validated with quantitative studies. The next steps in this process should involve developing a quantitative measure of the dimensions that emerged from our interviews. Further cross validation of these results is necessary to determine if the factor structure holds and if our dimensions predict incremental variance in

Acknowledgements

We thank the Human Capital Leadership Institute and the Behavioural Sciences Institute at Singapore Management University for supporting this research.

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