Humble Leadership and Team Innovation: The Mediating Role of Team Reflexivity and the Moderating Role of Expertise Diversity in Teams

The current study proposes a moderated mediation model to explain the relationship between humble leadership and team innovation. Our hypothesis integrates social information processing (SIP) theory with the existing literature on humble leadership. As a result, we theorize that when a humble individual leads a team, the team members are more likely to reconsider strategies, review events with self-awareness, share diverse information, and adapt to new ideas, which in turn promotes innovative team activities. Moreover, consistent with the research that emphasizes the inclusion of team culture in exploring leader-innovation relationships, we investigate the moderating role of a team's expertise diversity in the above positive, indirect relationship. We test our model by using both archival and survey data collected from 135 teams within 18 medium-to-large internet technology firms in China. The findings largely support our theoretical assertions, suggesting that humble leadership has important implications for team processes and innovation.