In the present study, we suggest that employees’ feedback seeking could benefit from leaders’ expressed humility. First, a leader’s humility expresses the leader’s desire to achieve accurate self-awareness (Owens et al., 2013). To develop such an awareness, leaders with high expressed humility may focus on interactions in organizations through which they could receive self-evaluative information. They interact with employees seriously and have the potential to build and maintain a higher-quality and more credible two-way feedback channel (Owens et al., 2013). As a result, employees would be motivated to seek feedback.

Second, a leader’s expressed humility contains a genuine appreciation of others’ strengths or abilities (Owens et al., 2013; Rego et al., 2018). Leaders who possess high expressed humility tend to give credit to employees’ extra efforts (Owens et al., 2013). They are more likely to notice and encourage the positive behaviors and initiative of their subordinates. Working with such leaders, employees could perceive that their efforts are expected and valued and may consider their leaders as secure and reliable sources for feedback.

Third, leaders with high expressed humility are considered to have high teachability (Owens et al., 2013). They have a strong willingness to learn from others so that they are more open and receptive to their employees’ ideas, advice, or information (Rego et al., 2018). For humble leaders, employees’ feedback-seeking behavior is more likely to be seen as a beneficial practice that may contribute to learning and development for both supervisors and subordinates. As such, humble leaders could create a supportive environment for personal learning and development (Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2017), which could encourage employees to engage in feedback seeking. Accordingly,

By decreasing employees’ perceived image cost, humble leaders could promote feedback seeking by employees. First, employees may view a humble leader as a role model. Previous scholars have stressed the notion that a leader’s expressed humility positively relates to collective humility in organizations (Owens and Hekman, 2016). In the present study, we argue that employees may imitate their leader’s humility behaviors (Owens and Hekman, 2016). Specifically, when humble leaders show their determination to achieve accurate self-awareness, employees may also be encouraged to pursue their own self-awareness (Qian et al., 2012). In line with this, employees would be more likely to consider the potential value of feedback seeking in terms of achieving accurate self-awareness and be less likely to take its possible cost of image damage into account, thus feeling motivated to seek feedback.

Second, humble leaders believe that everybody has his/her weaknesses and they often show great tolerance for them (Morris et al., 2005; Sousa and van Dierendonck, 2017). In fact, humble leaders even have the courage to disclose their own limitations or weaknesses (Owens et al., 2013). Being inspired by humble leaders, employees may be more accepting and less concerned about the exposure of their weaknesses. This could foster more transparent two-way communications and develop higher-quality interpersonal interactions between leaders and followers. Consequently, employees would be more willing to ask for feedback from their leaders.

Third, the high teachability of humble leaders could send signals to employees that they encourage learning behaviors in the work context (Owens et al., 2013). Previous research suggest that being teachable may help make learning behaviors normal and guaranteed in the workplace (Owens and Hekman, 2012). Feedback-seeking behavior is one of the essential learning behaviors that are normally tied to mistakes and risks. Employees under the supervision of such teachable leaders are more likely to perceive this learning behavior as less costly in terms of damaging one’s image. As they perceive less image cost, employees are more willing to learn from humble leaders by seeking feedback. Accordingly,

The data used in this study were collected from a hotel group situated in a large city in China. One of the authors was invited to lead a training program for this hotel group. The participants were 64 supervisors who had attended the training program and they were recruited at the end of the training program. With the support of the human resources department we randomly selected five subordinates of each supervisor from a list of names. Separate questionnaires were prepared for and distributed to 64 supervisors and their 320 subordinates; all were completed by paper and pencil. Supervisor participants and subordinate participants finished supervisor questionnaires and subordinate questionnaires respectively. Supervisor participants were asked to rate their perceptions of the subordinates’ feedback seeking behavior, while subordinate participants were asked to rate their perceptions of the immediate supervisor’s humility, perceived image cost of feedback seeking, and power distance. Demographic information was collected from both groups.

Participants completed the survey voluntarily. After completing the survey, each participant was given a small gift (a pen costing 15 RMB) as an incentive. We ensured participants’ confidentiality by providing a return envelope with seal tape for participants to seal the finished questionnaire; participants were instructed to complete the questionnaires, enclose them in the sealed envelopes, and return them at a company-wide meeting which was held 2 weeks later for all employees (both supervisory and non-supervisory). Subordinates’ responses were matched with their immediate supervisors’ responses by numerical codes and not names. We obtained participants’ written informed consent before the implementation of data collection. All these procedures were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards with written informed consent from all subjects. The present study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at the Business School of Beijing Normal University.

Of all those surveyed, 57 supervisors and 248 subordinates returned questionnaires which were used for hypothesis testing (i.e., 89.06 and 77.5% response rate, respectively). Among the final sample of subordinate respondents, 62.1% were men. The average age, organizational tenure, and team tenure were 32.58 (SD = 8.28), 6.31 (SD = 3.99), and 4.18 (SD = 2.21) years, respectively.

The measures used in the present study were originally constructed in English. In order to ensure equivalence of the measures in the Chinese and the English versions of the survey instrument, we performed a standard translation and back-translation procedure, following Brislin (1980). The Chinese version was subsequently pilot-tested on employees of the participating organization who were excluded from the final sample.

First, we carried out confirmatory factor analysis in AMOS 22.0 to assess the distinctiveness of the variables studied. As employees were nested in teams, we examined the ICC1 and ICC2 to determine whether multilevel analysis was appropriate. We then conducted regression analyses in SPSS 22 to test our model; the results are reported in Table 3. We also examined whether the indirect association between humility and feedback seeking using the PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2013) to implement moderated mediation analysis.

Table 1 presents the confirmatory factor analysis results. Given the relatively small sample size, relative to the number of parameters, the use of parcels is appropriate (Matsunaga, 2008). We used factorial algorithm (averageing the highest and lowest loadings to establish the first indicator, Matsunaga, 2008) to create parcels for each latent variables, and finally all the scales were trimmed to three parcels. As shown, the four-factor model fitted the data well (χ² = 108.01; df = 48; χ²/df = 2.25; RMSEA = 0.07; CFI = 0.97; TLI = 0.96). We compared the fit of the hypothesized four-factor model with that of a null model, two three-factor models, one two-factor model and one one-factor model. As shown in Table 1, the four-factor model fitted the data better than the other models, providing evidence of the distinctiveness of the constructs of leaders’ expressed humility, and employees’ perceived image cost, power distance orientation and feedback-seeking tendency.

This study has several important theoretical implications. First, we have shown that humble leaders play a dynamic role in the feedback-seeking process by analyzing leaders’ expressed humility as an antecedent of employees’ seeking of feedback. Many studies have investigated relationships between leadership style and feedback seeking (e.g., VandeWalle et al., 2000; Chen et al., 2007; Qian et al., 2012), but leaders’ expressed humility has been surprisingly absent from consideration although humility is regarded as “a fundamental quality of a good manager and good management” (Argandona, 2015, p. 63). This may be because traditional studies of humility focus mainly on its intrapersonal aspects and consider humble leaders as passive and as having low self-esteem (Rego et al., 2018) and thus be less favored sources for employees seeking feedback. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate the interpersonal benefits of humility and suggest that it is particularly critical to exchanges of information in supervisor-subordinate dyads (Owens et al., 2013). Although scholars emphasize the importance of humility in information exchange between leaders and followers, some important issues remain unknown. Owens et al. (2013) redefined humility as expressed humility, which focuses on the interpersonal and behavioral aspects, and following empirical studies have examined the relationship between leaders’ expressed humility and workplace outcomes (e.g., Ou et al., 2015; Rego et al., 2018). Considering these recent studies (Owens et al., 2013; Ou et al., 2015; Rego et al., 2018), our modeling supports the idea that there are strong theoretical reasons to expect an association between humility and feedback-seeking behavior. This study represents the first attempt to examine empirically the relationship between expressed humility and feedback seeking. It thus extends knowledge of the antecedents of feedback-seeking behavior and contributes to research on unlocking the benefits of humility in organizations.

Second, employees’ perceived image cost has been considered and explored as a primary determinant of employees’ feedback seeking in a large number of previous research studies (e.g., Ashford, 1986; VandeWalle et al., 2000; Ashford et al., 2003; Qian et al., 2012; Choi et al., 2014; Chun et al., 2014; Anseel et al., 2015). We extend this topic by examining the mediating effect of employees’ perceived image cost on the humility-feedback seeking relationship. By doing so, the present study also identified the process through which humble leaders could influence employees’ feedback seeking. Third, we examined the contingency side of the humility-perceived image cost relation by addressing the exploratory question of whether individuals’ power distance orientation plays a moderating role. Previous scholars focused mainly on examining humility in Western cultures and have made considerable progress, while the influences and the contingency sides of humility in non-Western contexts are still a largely unknown area (Oc et al., 2015). To fill this gap, the present study examined the unique moderating effect of power distance orientation in a Chinese setting, suggesting that the positive influence of leaders’ expressed humility on reducing employees’ perceived image cost will be weaker when employees possess higher power distance orientation.

The present study also provides some important suggestions for managerial practice. First, our findings suggest that leaders’ expressed humility can effectively generate employees’ feedback seeking. Accordingly, organizations should attach importance to humility when selecting and training supervisors. With regard to selecting managers, organizations are suggested to take humility as an important criterion (Ou et al., 2015). In terms of how to develop humility among leaders, previous researchers have advised organizations to use systematic training programs (Ou et al., 2015). More specifically, some researchers suggest that personal humility may be potentially developed via giving reality-based feedback about one’s merits and demerits, or not overemphasizing one’s performance and contributions in his/her last job (Exline and Geyer, 2004; Owens et al., 2013). Second, our findings also suggest that employees’ perceived image cost could mediate the humility-feedback seeking relation. Thus, besides learning to behave as humble leaders, supervisors should also make the extra effort to master how to alleviate employees’ concerns about damage to their image. To achieve this, supervisors can behave professionally, listen to their employees’ words empathetically, and counsel their subordinates sincerely (Choi et al., 2014). Third, our findings concerning the moderating influence of power distance orientation suggest that supervisors should pay particular attention to individuals’ different cultural values when trying to exert influence. It is suggested that supervisors act differently on the basis of the employee’s special cultural values (Lin et al., in press). For example, supervisors may show their powerful aspects to employees with high power distance orientation in order to meet their cultural expectations (Yuan and Zhou, 2015) and show genuine concern about their daily lives in order to relieve their tension in front of leaders (Lin et al., in press).

The present study also has several limitations. First, our data was solely collected from one Chinese company. This may limit the general applicability of our findings. For example, China is considered to have high power distance cultural contexts (e.g., Yuan and Zhou, 2015), which may influence individuals’ cultural values. Thus, it may be speculated as to whether our findings concerning the moderating role of power distance orientation are applicable to other cultures. In the present study, the average rating (using a seven-point Likert scale) of perceived image cost was lower (M = 2.20, SD = 0.58) than that of previous studies (Choi et al., 2014; Chun et al., 2014). This might attribute to the characteristics of our sample. Employees working in hotels play an important role in service encounters. In other to deliver high quality service, they often obtain various forms of feedback information about themselves. The perceived image cost of seeking feedback is thus lower in this workplace. We encourage future researches to collect data from other types of organizations in diversified industries and/or cultures.

Second, although our hypotheses are supported, we cannot draw definitive conclusions. As two paths are “marginally significant,” we conducted supplementary analysis to examine our model without control variables and computed the effect sizes. However, the small effect sizes may contribute to Type II error (Cohen, 1992). Thus, the current need larger sample sizes to provide robust results. Besides, because we apply cross-sectional design in the present study, the causal inferences of the positive relationship between leaders’ expressed humility and employees’ feedback seeking cannot be determined. Supervisors may behave more humbly in front of subordinates who seek feedback from them more proactively and frequently. Additional quasi-experimental or longitudinal research is needed to clarify this issue. Third, the present study focuses on the cost-minimizing role of leaders’ expressed humility in the feedback-seeking process. Given the important roles of the cost-value framework in interpreting the underlying mechanisms of the feedback-seeking process (Anseel et al., 2015), researchers may also take the potential mediating effect of value perceptions into consideration. Indeed, many previous effective leadership studies simultaneously investigated perceived cost and value as mediators in their theoretical models (Teunissen et al., 2009; Qian et al., 2012). Qian et al. (2012), for example, argued that authentic leaders stimulate followers’ feedback seeking from supervisors via decreasing employees’ perceived image costs as well as increasing the perceived value. Therefore, we encourage future studies to measure the perceived value of feedback seeking and examine its interaction effect with the perceived cost of feedback seeking to extend the present model.

Third, in this study we only controlled for the effects of variance in participants’ age, gender, educational level and company tenure, but humility is seen as an important feature of certain effective leadership styles (e.g., authentic leadership and transformational leadership) that have been shown have a positive influence on feedback-seeking behavior (Qian et al., 2012; Anseel et al., 2015). In future, therefore, researchers may wish to control for variance in these effective leadership styles in order to identify the unique contribution of humility to feedback-seeking as this would provide a more rigorous test of our model.

Finally, in the present study, we only used one other-report approach (i.e., subordinate-report approach) to measure leader’s expressed humility. Although previous studies argue that other-report measures provide more valid assessments than self-report measures (Rego et al., 2018), the present study would be better elaborated by including other types of raters. For example, future studies may measure leader’s expressed humility by using self-reported, subordinate-reported, and peer-reported approaches (Rego et al., 2018). By doing so, scholars may identify the differences between informant-rated humility and self-reported humility (e.g., Rego et al., 2018). In addition, future studies may also measure leader’s expressed humility by using a consensus assessment among other-report ratings and self-report ratings (Davis et al., 2010; Meagher et al., 2015), extending the present study to a multi-level model.