Up Close and Powerful: Leaders' Personal Sense of Power and Psychological Closeness to Their Team as Antecedents of Leader Humility, Subordinate Job Engagement and Trust

Abstract

Research on leader humility clearly attests to its positive consequences for followers' work-related outcomes, yet we have only limited knowledge about the antecedents that facilitate leaders expressing humility. Drawing from theoretical works on leadership and power, we posit that leaders' personal sense of power and their psychological closeness to their team constitute important antecedents of leader humility. Specifically, we reason that the impact of supervisors' sense of power on humble leader behavior is qualified by how psychologically close to their subordinates the supervisors deem themselves to be. We investigate the ramifications of this interaction for leader effectiveness by assessing its indirect effects on subordinates' job engagement and trust (via leader-expressed humility). We test our notions using data from 69 supervisors and their 210 direct subordinates from various organizations and industries in a multi-level, multi-source study. Results indicate that supervisors' sense of power relates positively to expressed humility for supervisors who report being close to their team but negatively for supervisors who do not feel close. Results also support our conditional-indirect-effects hypotheses involving job engagement and trust as work-related outcomes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for supervisors with a relatively low or relatively high personal sense of power.