리더의 겸손이 구성원의 창의성과 과업 성과에 미치는 영향: 학습지향성의 매개 효과

Recent studies show that bottom-up leadership traits, such as humility, produce positive behavior outcomes for both individuals and groups. Among those follower-centric leadership traits, leader humility has been studied since early 2000 as one of the effective leadership traits with the advent of positive psychology. Integrating social information processing theory and social learning theory, this study investigated how leader humility influenced both employees’ creativity and task performance and proved its mechanism by developing a research model (attached) and 5 hypotheses. We analyzed data from 137 employees across industries to confirm the validity of our research model and hypotheses. We found that perceived leaders’ humility positively affected employee creativity(β＝0.251, p＝0.003), task performance(β＝0.247, p＝0.006), and employee learning orientation(β＝0.297, p<0.001). And it’s also revealed that these relationships between perceived leader humility and employee creativity(β＝0.470, p<0.001) and task performance(β＝0.484, p<0.001) respectively were fully mediated by employee learning orientation. When creativity is concerned, prior studies of leader humility are mainly done at the group level, so our study expanded its research focus to individual-level creativity. And this study identified leader humility as a crucial antecedent of individual learning orientations that foster intrinsic motivation in assigned tasks and roles at work. Additionally, we are bringing the attention of organizational leaders and HRD practitioners to the importance of leaders’ humble behaviors and individual learning orientation when they want to promote creative behaviors of an individual employee or a group and improve their task performance. By defining and understanding specific behavioral standards of leader humility, practical managerial recommendations which can be implemented in leadership development, training, and hiring processes are provided.