Leader Humility and Team Creativity: The Role of Team Information Sharing, Psychological Safety, and Power Distance - Hu et al. - 2017 - Article

What is team creativity?

Team creativity emerges from interactions between members to evaluate diverse perspectives to collectively generate novel and useful ideas for the team. Requirements for teams to be creative include members´ attention to problems and flaws related to their work, an openness to sharing and discussing new ideas and learning from others, and willingness to evaluate one´s own and others´ ideas objectively to find creative ways of improvement. 

How can leader humility influence team creativity?

Humility is an interpersonal trait that embodies three interdependent aspects, namely a willingness to view the self accurately and acknowledge limits, the appreciation of others´ strengths and contributions, and teachability. Team leaders should create enabling conditions to promote team creativity. Leader humility is how a leader views shortcomings and others´ strengths and whether the leader is open to new ideas. Leaders with humility view problems and mistakes as opportunities. They are appreciative of divergent ideas from members. Leaders with humility facilitate creativity-relevant team mechanisms. Two interpersonally oriented team factors that connect leader humility to team creativity are identified, namely information sharing and psychological safety.

How is leader humility related to team information sharing?

Information sharing refers to the process of exchanging ideas and information among members.The authors give three reasons of why leader humility is expected to be positively related to team information sharing:

• Humble leaders have a healthy self-awareness that allows them to be open to limitations and admitting to problems. A humble leader will proactively look for limitations of teamwork and actively exchange information. 
• Humble leaders appreciate others´ contributions. 
• Humble leaders are open to different ideas. 

How is leader humility related to psychological safety?

Psychological safety refers to the extent to which members feel the team is interpersonally nonthreatening. It is a shared belief that the team is a safe place for risk taking. The authors give three reasons of why leader humility is expected to be positively related to team psychological safety:

• Humble leaders signal to members that making mistakes and taking risks are acceptable, which generates a climate of safety in the team. 
• Humble leaders recognize members´ strengths, making them feel appreciated, valued, supported, and more confident. 
• Humble leaders prioritize growth for themselves and for the members. This encourages the members to embrace a learning attitude and creates a shared belief that members will not disrespect or embarrass someone for making a new suggestion. 

How are team information sharing and psychological safety expected to be positively related to team creativity?

Team information sharing broadens the scope of team skills, inspires members to look for new solutions, and generates new ideas. The psychological safety climate serves as a supportive social context for team members to respectfully manage diverse and even conflicting creative perspectives. They will be able to effectively integrate alternative courses of action that contribute to team creativity. The cognitive process of generating creative ideas for the team contributes to team creativity. 

What is power distance and how does it relate to leader humility?

The extent to which humility benefits leaders and teams may be context specific. The benefits of leader humility on creativity-relevant processes are contingent on whether members see humility as desirable. Power distance is the extent to which members see the distance between leaders and themselves as legitimate. This may influence how members react to leader humility. When team power distance is high, members expect leaders to be dominant, take charge, and give strong direction. In these conditions, humility in a leader may be negatively interpreted. When team power distance is low, most team members desire more power sharing. In those conditions, team members are more willing to follow the leaders´ guidance and they feel safe to take risks and share information. 

Which factors facilitate team creativity according to the theory of the team climate?

The theory of team climate distinguishes four factors that facilitate team creativity, namely:

• Vision refers to the clearly defined objectives and mission for the team. 
• Participative safety refers to the creativity-relevant environment in which more people participate in decision making through having influence, interacting, and sharing information, and are met with non-threatening trust and support. 
• Task orientation refers to the focus on producing quality task outcomes.
• Support for innovation refers to the practical support for novelty that is often expressed in documents, policies, and statements, as well as resources provided for innovation. 

What are the main results from this study?

• Leader humility did not have a direct significant effect on team creativity. However, leaders´ characteristics and behaviors are important as input for team effectiveness and may influence team performance through mediating roles. 
• Leader humility indirectly contributed to team creativity through promoting team members´ information exchange, but not through a psychological safety climate. 
• The relationship between leader humility and psychological safety depended on team power distance values. 

How can the moderating role of team power distance values of the relationship between leader humility and psychological safety be interpreted? 

In teams with low power distance, leader humility was positively related to team information seeking but not to psychological safety. This may suggest that psychological safety in low power distance teams has drivers other than leader humility and that simply working with a humble leader is not enough to feel safe. In high power distance teams, leader humility was not related to team information sharing, and negatively related to team psychological safety. Humble leaders working in teams who expect leaders to be dominant may cause feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration with the leader. These negative emotions with regards to the leaders may damage the psychological safety feelings of the members.