Recent scholarly and practitioner attention toward the role of humility in organizational leadership has spurred calls to understand the how this virtue would play out in a leadership role. Toward this end, I draw on several literatures to define the construct of humility, discuss its roots in implicit theories of the self, and distinguish humility from related constructs. In Section One, the first two studies of this dissertation are reported which (Study 1) develop and validate a self- and other-report measure of humility, and (Study 2) examine the strength of humility predictions of individual performance relative to conscientiousness, global self-efficacy, and general mental ability. This study also revealed that humility may have a compensatory effect on performance for those with lower general mental ability.

In Section Two, I report on a study that used a blended methods approach to examine humility within a leadership context (Study 3). Drawing from a sample of leaders from a mortgage firm and using an interpretivist approach, this study assimilates insights from 30 semistructured interviews with leaders from four different hierarchical levels, multiyear firm financial and turnover data, and 360 degree leader evaluation data, into a model representing the antecedents, consequences, and contingencies of humility in leadership. I discuss the enablers of developing and expressing humility in a leadership role. I report on contingencies which appear to determine the efficacy of humility in leadership. Finally, I report some of the individual, team/unit, and organizational consequences of humility in leadership. I conclude with recommendations for future research.

Key words. Humility, scale development, personality, construct validation, cognitive ability.