From Humble Leadership to Follower Performance: A Meta-analysis of Relational and Cognitive Mechanisms

Abstract

Unclarity remains in current literature pertaining to the effects and specific processes of humble leadership, calling for more in-depth reviews for boosting the understanding. Our research focuses on follower performance as an important outcome of humble leadership and aims to conduct a meta-analysis to uncover the mechanisms beneath the effecting process. Integrating social exchange theory and social cognitive theory, we proposed that follower's relationship with the leader and their belief in themselves, respectively acting as relational and cognitive mechanisms, would sequentially mediate the relationship between humble leadership and follower performance, including task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. We adopted meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) to examine our hypotheses and gained empirical support from the results. With the synthesis of literature, this article exerts to unfold the effecting process and potential mechanisms of humble leadership on follower performance, anticipating to make several theoretical contributions and practical implications as well as providing insights for future research.