Multi-Level Effects of Humble Leadership on Employees' Work Well-Being: The Roles of Psychological Safety and Error Management Climate.

Peng Song,Zheng Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571840

Abstract

Employees’ work well-being (WWB) is vital to employees’ performance and organizations’ sustainable development. This study aims to explore the role of psychological safety and error management climate (EMC) between humble leadership and WWB in Chinese organizations. Drawing upon social information processing theory, a multi-level study was conducted to test the underlying mechanisms between humble leadership and employees’ WWB. A time-lagged data of 221 team members was collected from 12 small and medium sized companies in China. Results showed that team-level humble leadership was positively related to WWB. Psychological safety and EMC both played a partial mediating role linking humble leadership and WWB. EMC positively moderated the relationship between humble leadership and psychological safety. This paper contributes to revealing the multi-level effects of humble leadership on work well-being. These findings also provide some important implications for managerial practices.

Highlights

With the rise of positive psychology and psychology of sustainability (Di, 2017), work well-being (WWB), a form of well-being, has attracted much attention from academia (Liu et al, 2009)
We conducted Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) by using Mplus 7.0 to examine the distinctiveness of member-rated variables
We examined Hypothesis 4 which states that error management climate (EMC) moderated the relationship between humble leadership and psychological safety

Summary

Introduction

With the rise of positive psychology and psychology of sustainability (Di, 2017), work well-being (WWB), a form of well-being, has attracted much attention from academia (Liu et al, 2009). Exploring different ways to improve employees’ WWB is of great significance (Choi et al, 2017). Previous research has found that WWB is influenced by individual differences and context factors, such as positive emotions (Siu et al, 2015), work-related stress (Siu et al, 2005), highperformance work systems (Zhang et al, 2013), and organizational justice (Moliner et al, 2008). Throughout the research on the predictors of WWB, leadership has been identified as a key influential factor (Choi et al, 2017; Zhong et al, 2020). Studies have explored the influence of ethical leadership (Chughtai et al, 2015), transformational leadership (Liu et al, 2009), and authentic

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