Humble Leadership and Team Innovation: a moderated mediation

Although there is growing scholarly attention towards the positive effects of leader humility on team outcomes, extent research has failed to consider whether and how humble leadership influences team innovation. In this research, we propose a moderated mediation model to explain the relationship between humble leadership and team innovation. Integrating social learning theory and leader humility literature, we hypothesize that when a humble leader leads a team, the team followers are more likely to reconsider their strategies, review past events with self-awareness, share diverse information and adapt to new ideas, which in turn promotes team innovative activities. Moreover, consistent with research emphasizing the inclusion of team culture in exploring leader-innovation relationships, we investigate the moderating role of expertise diversity in the above positive indirect effect. We test the model by using both survey and archival data that was collected from 135 teams of 25 medium-to -large -sized firms in the internet technology industry in China. Findings largely support our theoretical assertions, suggesting that humble leadership has important implications for team process and innovation.