This literature review assesses how the dynamics of humility affect leadership in team settings.

Literature Review: Assessing how the dynamics of humility affect leadership in team settings. Name: Institutional affiliation: Course: Date: Abstract Leadership refers to the kind of relationship whereby an individual influences others, with the influenced often referred to as followers. Among the many leadership traits, humility features as an effective force in contemporary leadership. Accordingly, humility which has been defined as the tendency to view oneself accurately while displaying appreciation for other people’s contributions, plays a central role in the paper. Through literature review, this paper explores how the dynamics of humility leadership affect leadership in a team. According to expansive research, humility together with its mediating factors offers a wide range of benefits to teams including creating room for humility leaders to nurture and empower leadership behaviors, job satisfaction due to an increased sense of job relatedness, and reduced psychological power, which often limits team members from seeking feedback. The literature analysis, showcases humility as a force necessary for leaders to leverage in today's team framework, largely due to its ability to trigger psychological safety among team members and foster trust and collaboration, which are vital tools in effective teams. While humility is presented as a positive trait among leaders, some research still argues that the consensus that humility leadership serves teams and organizations better is premature. For opponents, humility leaders tend to shift responsibility to followers, to accurately represent their mistakes, and to rely on the contribution of followers, occurrences which are highly in contradiction with agentic traits of leadership such as confidence, assertiveness, and competency. Nonetheless, humility remains a major trait in leadership and future research should deeply explore the boundary conditions and the possible drawbacks of this trait in leadership. Assessing how the dynamics of humility affect leadership in team settings. Lehmann et al., (2023) define leadership as the kind of relationship through which an individual(s) influences other individuals’ behaviors. Ideally, leadership is not just about understanding departmental functions but being able to coordinate other people’s activities while giving them the motivation to meet organizational requirements. With the right and effective leadership in place, an organization enjoys benefits which include increased revenue, healthy corporate culture, motivated employees, increased access to resources and improved communication. The identification and implementation of an action plan that brings about goal attainment in an organization represent a major problem-solving aspect that ensures the generation and implementation of both proactive and reactive solutions, key to effective leadership. Leaders have to come up with a plan that works within an organization's context, and at the same time, implement the plan to completion within a socially distinct context, while marshaling support, guiding employees including subordinates, communicating, and motivating everyone involved. For many years, research has categorized effective communication, accountability and responsibility, confidence, self-motivation, emotional stability, and people orientation as critical leadership traits. While a key trait in effective leadership, humility is often not cited as a major trait in effective leadership. But with the world shifting towards team-based performance, egocentric and arrogant leaders seem to be losing it, as leading today's teams effectively calls for leaders who not only can attract and inspire their followers, but also humble. Humility according to Owen, Johnson & Mitchell (2013) refers to the tendency to view oneself accurately while displaying appreciation for other people’s contributions. This literature review explored how the dynamics of humility affect leadership in team settings. Ideally, understanding humility as a trait and as a critical force in team performance is important. Defining and Conceptualizing Leader Humility Across cultures, humility which is characterized by kindness, humanness, and caring for others, is considered an important virtue (Auzoult, 2013). Being a socially shaped trait, it often refers to the attitudinal reflection of how one perceives oneself concerning others. This means that humility often demands self-reflection of one’s key strengths and weaknesses. As a result, self-reflection often tends to put an individual on a continuous part of self-improvement, which is why most humble leaders will always shift focus from themselves to others, by always acknowledging their followers’ strengths (Owens & Hekman, 2012). According to Chiu et al., (2016), followers prefer working under leaders who are not prideful or boastful; because by nature people love working for the underdog – the kind of people who do not think highly of themselves but embrace themselves and their talents as they are. The not boastful leaders are humble, a trait predominantly present among servant leaders. Qin et al., (2020) write that the humility trait is characterized by three main components namely: (a) the willingness to view oneself accurately while acknowledging personal faults, personal limits and mistakes; (b) the appreciation of the follower’s contributions and strengths; and (c) the openness and teachability of oneself to feedback and new ideas (Qin et al., 2020). In agreement, Owens and Hekman (2016) write that humility is a major aspect of servant leadership because servant leaders are the kind of people who will acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of team members while encouraging them to build appropriate skills and take up new challenges. Servant leaders are humble and often put the needs of other people ahead of their own needs. Greenleaf, R. K. (2008). The servant as leader. According to Greenleaf Greenleaf (2008), servant leaders are called to be servants first before anything else. Scholars such as Krumrei-Mancuso & Rowatt, (2023) are the very few supporters of servant leadership with Piper (2018) embracing the critical role of humility among servant leaders. For successful leadership, humility remains key, because followers always tend to follow not-so-boastful leaders but quietly leaders who often show skill, knowledge, and vision. Transformational leadership integrates humility into its leadership framework. According to Sousa & Van Dierendonck, (2017) transformational leaders, just like servant leaders, have a unique sense of humility. This humility puts them in a position of constant learning and constant listening to followers. Oftentimes, transformational leaders do not get tired or comfortable because knowing that they do not have all the answers allows them to remain flexible, ensuring that they cope even during rapid change. For transformational leaders, humility represents authenticity. With people interested in authenticity, leaders who manage to portray shortcomings, easily give their followers permission to behave or act likewise. As reported by Hu et al., (2018) humility drives collaboration in a team. While authoritarian leaders will use power to demand and give instructions, humble leaders thrive to empower, delegate duties, and encourage team members to put in their great ideas without discrimination. More so, humble leaders, from a transformative leadership perspective, promote others and not themselves. Non-humble leaders will always want to stay at the top, whereas humble leaders will always find ways to help team members rise to new levels within and without the organizational setting. Qin et al., (2020) agree further that humility promotes integrity which is a vital component among successful leaders. Humble leaders are more likely to operate with integrity than non-humble leaders. Empirical Research on Humility and Leadership Expansive research has demonstrated several benefits associated with humility among leaders, and its role in effective leadership. Chiu, Owens, & Tesluk, (2016) in their quantitative research study on leader humility, proposed that leader humility was positively related to team-shared leadership and that humility – the shared leadership association was strengthened whenever the level of team proactive personality was high (Chiu, Owens, & Tesluk, 2016, p.1713). true to their research findings on a sample size of 62, team leader humility was confirmed to facilitate the development of shared leadership in a team largely by fostering leader-follower interaction within the team. With humility leadership a vital tool in team leadership, formal team leaders can improve teamwork by demonstrating humble behaviors such as praising their followers and showing willingness to learn from them. Humility behaviors as argued in the research study create room for providing and receiving feedback from both leaders and followers, thus reiterating the unique strengths and expertise within teams. Furthermore, with humble leadership in place, team members develop the confidence to lead whenever the team needs them and are even more willing to take in constructive feedback while appreciating the expertise of their team leaders and peers. In short, humility leadership is a critical force in fostering shared leadership in an organization, and it gains more force if the team members are proactive. In their research study by Di, Jinpeng, Yan, & Yahua, (2018) was based on data from questionnaire survey of 277 members sourced from about 52 different construction projects, it was determined that the humbler a leader was within a team, the less likely status conflict occurred within the team. Secondly, the research concluded that the less likely a team faced status conflict, the more likely a team experienced cooperation and task coordination; and the less likely they engaged in social sanction behaviors. Finally, the research concluded that the relationship between leader humility and stated behaviors was majorly mediated by organizational status conflict. The revela...