Summary

As businesses continue to strive for higher standards of morality and researchers’ interest in positive organizational scholarship grows, interest in the construct of humble leadership has accumulated. As a function of this rapid progression, several key findings have emerged. In terms of empirical measures of humble leadership, there exist several psychometrically sound measures and approaches. While there remains some debate on the dimensions of humble leadership, the three dimensions of (a) admitting mistakes and limitations, (b) spotlighting follower strengths and contributions, and (c) modeling teachability consistently appear in most conceptualizations of humble leadership. As such, these three dimensions of humble leadership constitute core elements of humble leadership. Regarding outcomes associated with humble leadership, across levels of analysis, humble leadership generally leads to positive effects for individual followers, teams, and organizations. Likewise, research has generally found that when leaders engage in humble leadership this typically results in improved follower perceptions of the leader and positive career outcomes for the leader, although it can result in some negative effects for the leader. The antecedents of humble leadership are relatively less studied, although research notes that both individual factors such as personality and situational factors contribute to humble leadership. Despite these important findings, additional research that explores the antecedents of humble leadership, better recognizes the nuances and multidimensionality of humble leadership, and applies stronger methodological approaches is warranted.