Linking leader humility with follower performance: A perspective of multi-foci relational identification

One distinctive feature of leader humility is its facilitation of followers’ development-oriented relational identity. Drawing on relational identity theory, we argue that leader humility, a kind of bottom–up leadership, enhances followers’ multi-foci relational identifications and subsequent multi-foci performance. Furthermore, leader workplace status is a boundary condition affecting the indirect relationships between leader humility and employee performance through multi-foci relational identifications. In an experiment (Study 1), we manipulated leader humility and results supported the positive indirect relationships of leader humility and multi-foci performance through multi-foci relational identification. In a field study (Study 2), we tested our hypotheses with two-wave data from a sample of 380 office workers in 82 groups in China. The results of Study 2 largely support our conceptual framework. However, we found that leader workplace status did not facilitate the relationship between leader humility and follower relational identification to leader. Taken together, converging results from the two studies suggest that leader humility promotes followers’ multi-foci relational identifications and subsequent multi-foci performance, and leader workplace status facilitates the indirect relationship of leader humility and follower interpersonal organizational citizenship behavior (OCBI) through relational identification to coworkers.