Humble CEOs Are Best For Business, New Study Says
James Collins, author of the 2001 business classic Good to Great, likes to tellthe story of Darwin E. Smith, the shy, reserved CEO of Kimberly-Clark for two decades until 1991. When Smith was asked how he turned around the maker of Kleenex and Huggies, generating returns to investors that were four times better than the stock market’s, Collins quotes him as saying, “I was just trying to become qualified for the job.”
Though Collins has described how humility can make leaders better at their jobs, there has been a striking absence of empirical research to back up that notion, says Angelo Kinicki, management professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Most CEO studies look at the flip side of the personality coin. For instance I recently wrote about a study showing that narcissistic CEOs who run tech companies make more money than their less dominant, less entitled counterparts.
Kinicki was thinking of testing the proposition that humble CEOs like Darwin Smith could be powerful leaders, when one of his graduate students, China-born Amy Ou, suggested it would be interesting to look at some of the leadership traits associated with Confucianism. Those traits include self-awareness, openness to feedback, and a focus on the greater good and others’ welfare, as opposed to dwelling on oneself. Ou, who is now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, thought that China would be a good place to gather data, because of Confucianism’s influence. She also had a network of corporate contacts there and she teamed up with another Chinese colleague at the business school, Anne Tsui, who had connections in China.
Together with three other colleagues in the U.S. and China, the researchers wound up interviewing the CEOs of 63 private Chinese companies. They also gave surveys to 1,000 top- and mid-level managers who worked with the CEOs. The surveys and interviews aimed to determine how a humble leadership style would affect not so much the bottom line as the top and mid-level managers who worked under the CEOs. Did managers feel empowered by CEOs’ humility, did they feel as though they were invited into company decision-making, and did that lead to a higher level of activity and engagement?
The study was a challenge to complete because the researchers had to quiz the CEOs about whether they regarded themselves as humble and then test that judgment with mid- and upper-level management. “We had a whole separate study validating that finding,” says Kinicki. The study rated the CEOs’ humility on a 1-6 scale, with the mean falling at 4.47; in other words, most of the CEOs tended to be more humble than not.
The study’s conclusion: The more humble the CEO, the more top- and mid-level managers reported positive reactions. Top-level managers said they felt their jobs were more meaningful, they wanted to participate more in decision-making, they felt more confident about doing their work and they had a greater sense of autonomy. They also were more motivated to collaborate, to make decisions jointly and to share information. Likewise middle managers felt more engaged and committed to their jobs when the top boss was more humble.
How likely is it that these findings would translate to the U.S.? “I think humble leaders in the U.S. will have the same cascading influence on others as they do in China,” says Kinicki. “People like to be empowered and they like to be treated fairly. That’s as true in the U.S. as it is in other parts of the world.”
But the researchers studied companies in China in part because the tradition of Confucianism is so strong there, and thus they thought it was more likely they would find a greater number of CEOs who exhibited humble characteristics than they could in the U.S. “The U.S. is one of the most individualistic nations in the world,” says Kinicki. “If you’re very individualistic, it’s kind of hard to be humble.”
Still, American bosses would do well to pay attention to the new study, which is published in the Administrative Sciences Quarterly.
Kinicki is in the process of conducting similar research on U.S. CEOs. His goal: to determine how CEO humility affects financial performance. His guess is that humble CEOs like Darwin Smith have a positive effect on the bottom line. “There is a negative stereotype that humble people are weak and indecisive,” Kinicki says. “That’s just not the case.”
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