Humility
Research Hub
Hello! Here are links to my research articles (for personal use only):
Chan, E.
T., Hekman, D. R., & Foo, M. D. 2024. An
examination of whether and how leader humility enhances leader personal career
success. Human Resource Management, 63(3), 427-442. 10.1002/hrm.22208
· Highlighted in Newsweek, April 8, 2024
· Highlighted in Decision Marketing and Workplace Insight, March 21, 2024
· Highlighted in LinkedIn also here
· Highlighted in The Conversation, April 18, 2024
· Highlighted in The Coloradan July 16, 2024
· Highlighted in Psychology Today August 5, 2024
Ragaglia, R. & Hekman, D.R. 2024. I
Want to Break Free: The Influence of Perceived Entrapment on Employee Turnover
Intention. Academy of Management Proceedings. Chicago. (1), 14766.
https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.14766abstract
· Highlighted in CU Boulder Today January 7, 2025
Lehmann, M., Pery, S., Kluger, A. N.,
Hekman, D. R., Owens, B. P., & Malloy, T. E. 2023. Relationship-Specific
(Dyadic) Humility: How Your Humility Predicts My Psychological Safety and
Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology. 108: 809-825. doi:10.1037/apl0001059
Highlighted in “The
Conversation,”
December 8, 2023
Decker, M. & Hekman, D.R. 2023. The
Hen House Effect: The Negative Repercussions of Working in Women-Only Teams. Academy of Management Proceedings. Boston. (1), 12606. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.12606abstract
· Highlighted in Latest@Leeds November 12, 2024
Hekman, D.R., Cropanzano, R., Chan, E.,
Kirk, J.F., Lamb, M. 2022. How illegitimate pay
inequality leads to worse performance via aggression and coworker devaluing. Academy of Management Proceedings. Seattle, WA. 1: 15045.
https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2022.15045abstract
Kirk, J.F., Hekman, D.R., Chan, E.T., Foo,
M.D. 2022. Public
Negative Labeling Effects on Team Interaction and Performance. Small Group Research.
First Published April 6, 2022 online. doi: 10.1177/10464964221082516
Hekman, D.R., Van Wagoner, P., Owens,
B., Mitchell, T.R., Holtom, B., Lee,
T.M, Dinger, J. 2022. An
Examination of Whether and How Prevention Climate Alters the Influence of
Turnover on Performance. Journal
of Management. 48: 542-570.
doi:10.1177/0149206320978451
Kahle Family Research Award Finalist, 2023
Zorgdrager, B., & Hekman, D.R., 2021. An Inductively-Derived Process Model of Nonprofit Leadership Behaviors and Mechanisms. Academy of Management Proceedings. Virtual Conference, August 2021. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.15746abstract
Marsh, V. & Hekman, D.R. 2021. Managing
Power Dependence in Diversity Work at San Francisco Bay Area High-Growth Firms
(2016-2020). Academy of Management Proceedings. Virtual Conference, August 2021.
https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.14720abstract
Lehmann, M., Pery,
S., Kluger, A.N., & Hekman, D.R. 2021. You Cause my Humility:
The Dyadic Effect of Co-Worker Humility on Performance. Academy
of Management Proceedings.
Virtual Conference, August 2021.
https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.12423abstract
Dinger, J., Conger,
M., Hekman, D.R., Bustamante, C. 2020. Somebody
That I Used to Know: The Immediate and Long-Term Effects of Social Identity in
Post-disaster Business Communities. Journal
of Business Ethics. 166: 115–141. doi:10.1007/s10551-019-04131-w
Van Wagoner, P., Embry, E., Barnes, L.Y., Rivin, J.M., Rick Reed, R. Hekman, D.R., Volpone, S.D., & Johnson, S.K. 2019. Leveraging Diversity to Enhance Inclusion Efforts for Team Processes and Outcomes. Academy of Management Proceedings. Boston, August 2019. doi: 10.5465/AMBPP.2019.15302abstract
Hekman, D.R., Johnson, S.K. Foo, M.D. & Yang, W. 2017. Does diversity-valuing behavior result in diminished performance ratings for nonwhite and female leaders? Academy of Management Journal. 60: 771-797. doi:10.5465/amj.2014.0538.
Highlighted
in the following media outlets:
· Forbes
· TIME
· Academy of Management (AOM)
in the News
· Mashable
· Jezebel
· NPR
· Glamour
· Fivethirtyeight.com, March 25, 2016
· CNN, March 24, 2016
· The Atlantic,
April 4, 2016
· Also summarized
and included in the Harvard Women and Public Policy Program's Gender
Action Portal (GAP – gap.hks.harvard.edu)
Johnson, S.K., Hekman, D.R., & Chan, E.T. 2016. If
There’s Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There’s Statistically No Chance
She’ll Be Hired. Harvard Business Review. April 26,
2016.
Johnson, S.K. & Hekman, D.R. 2016. Women
and Minorities Are Penalized for Promoting Diversity. Harvard
Business Review. March 23, 2016.
Owens, B. P.,
& Hekman, D. R. 2016. How does
leader humility influence team performance? Exploring the mechanisms of
contagion and collective promotion focus. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 1088-1111. doi: 10.5465/amj.2013.0660
· SIOP award for
being one of the top 10 articles published in 2016 (out of 955 management
articles published in the fifteen most prestigious management journals in 2016
and this was the only one of the 10 selected that was published in AMJ http://www.siop.org/tip/april17/gap.aspx)
York, J., Vedula, S., Conger, M., Hekman, D.R. 2016. Green to Gone: How Institutional Logics Impact the Survival of Social Entrepreneurs. Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research: Vol. 36 : Iss. 15, Article 4. https://digitalcollections.babson.edu/digital/collection/ferpapers/id/62/
Hekman,
D.R., van Knippenberg, D. & Pratt, M.G. 2015. Channeling
Identification: How Perceived Regulatory Focus Moderates the Influence of
Organizational and Professional Identification on Professional Employees’
Diagnosis and Treatment Behaviors, Human Relations, 69:
753–780. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0018726715599240
Schilpzand, P., Hekman, D. R., & Mitchell,
T. R. 2015. An
inductively generated typology and process model of workplace courage. Organization
Science, 26(1), 52-77.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2014.0928
*Finalist for best Positive Organizational Scholarship article published in 2015 award.
Saleh, S.H., Foo, M.D., Hekman, D.R., 2015. Mentor or Tormentor: Understanding How Mentors Impact Entrepreneurs’ Performance Using a Creativity Perspective. Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. 35: 5. https://digitalcollections.babson.edu/digital/collection/ferpapers/id/734/
Kirk, J., Hekman, D. R. Chan, E. 2015. It’s All in The Name: An Investigation of Bad Apple Antecedents. Academy of Management Proceedings, Vancouver, BC, August 2015, 18020. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2015.18020abstract
Sun, S. Owens, B.P., Hekman, D.R. 2014. When Proactive
Employees Meet Humble Leaders: Job Satisfaction, Innovation and Learning
Behavior. Academy of Management Proceedings. Philadelphia, August 2014, 12213.
Hekman, D.R., Yang, W. & Foo, M.D. 2014. Does valuing diversity result in worse performance ratings for minority and female leaders? Academy of Management Proceedings. Philadelphia, August 2014.
Owens, B.P., Hekman, D.R. 2013. Humility in Teams:
Collective Humility and Its Impact on Team Growth Climate and Performance. Academy
of Management Proceedings.
Orlando, August 2013, 14272.
Owens, B. & Hekman, D.R. 2012. Modeling How to
Grow: An Inductive Examination of Humble Leader Behaviors, Outcomes, and
Contingencies. Academy of Management Journal,
55: 787-818. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amj.2010.0441
Highlighted in the following media outlets:
Forbes February 16, 2012
The Atlantic January 13, 2012
Men's Health December 18, 2011Business News Daily December 12, 2011
Quality Digest December 10, 2011
Psych Central December 9, 2011
Science Daily December 8, 2011
Johnson, M., Morgeson, F. & Hekman, D.R.
2012. Cognitive
and Affective Identification: Developing a New Measure and Exploring the Links
between Different Forms of Social Identification and Personality with Work
Attitudes and Behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior,
33(8): 1142-1167. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-27698-006
*JOB Best Article Award Finalist
Hekman, D.R., Aquino, K.A., Owens, B., Mitchell, T.R.,
Schilpzand, P., Leavitt, K. 2010. An
Examination of Whether and How Racial and Gender Biases Influence Customer
Satisfaction. Academy of Management Journal. 53:
238 – 264. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMJ.2010.49388763
*AMJ Best Article
Award 2010.
* Saroj Parasuraman Award
for the Outstanding Publication on Gender and Diversity in 2010
Highlighted in the following media outlets:
The Washington Post, June 1, 2009
The Chicago Tribune, June 2, 2009 and September 1, 2009
UWM News, June 10, 2009
The NY Times, June 23, 2009
The Boston Globe, July 6, 2009
The Globe and Mail, July 20, 2009
Hekman, D.R., Steensma, H.K., Bigley, G.A.,
Hereford, J.F. 2009. Effects
of Organizational and Professional Identification
on the Relationship Between Administrators’ Social Influence and Professional Employees' Adoption of
New Work Behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology. 94
(5): 1325-1335.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2009-12532-015.html
Hekman, D.R., Bigley, G.A., Steensma, H.K., Hereford, J.F.
2009. Combined
Effects of Organizational and Professional Identification on the Reciprocity
Dynamic for Professional Employees. Academy of Management
Journal. 52(3): 506-526.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2009.41330897
Felps, W., Mitchell, T.R., Hekman, D.R., Lee, T.M, Holtom,
B., Harman, W. 2009. Turnover
Contagion: How Coworkers’ Job Embeddedness and Coworkers’ Job Search Behaviors
Influence Quitting. Academy of Management Journal.
52(3): 545-561.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMJ.2009.41331075
· Highlighted in Fortune, January 25, 2022
Reynolds, S.J., Schultz, F.C., Hekman, D.R. 2006. Stakeholder
Theory and Managerial Decision-making: Constraints and Implications of
Balancing Stakeholder Interests, Journal of Business Ethics.
64(3), 285-301.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-005-5493-2
Research
Statement 2025
My research aims to generate insights that help organizations become more humane and effective. My scholarly journey began with exploring ethics, identity, and turnover, and has since evolved to focus on the critical issues of diversity and humility. To date, I have published nine papers in UTD-ranked or top-tier OB journals (six in AMJ, two in JAP, one in OS), seven articles in FT50 journals (including two in HBR, two in JBE, one in JOM, one in HR, and one in HRM), and two additional peer-reviewed articles (JOB, SGR). Below, I review these research streams.
Ethics
My initial research as a doctoral student focused on whether a fair distribution of resources among stakeholders was attainable in organizations. We discovered that managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests are constrained by practical factors such as resource divisibility and unequal stakeholder saliency, leading them to adopt either a within-decision or across-decision approach with distinct instrumental and normative implications (Reynolds, Schultz and Hekman, 2006, FT50 list). Building on that, I explored whether the ancient virtue of courage could be applied in modern organizations. In a qualitative study of 94 workplace incidents, we found that most courageous actions involved "protecting the weak" by shielding vulnerable individuals from abusive authority. Our research revealed that employees first assess their personal responsibility before weighing the social costs of acting, thereby enriching intrinsic motivation theories and clarifying the cognitive underpinnings of actions such as whistle-blowing and speaking up (Schilpzand et al., 2015, UTD list). Finally, I investigated how leaders and teammates should respond to “bad” people within organizations. Our findings refuted the prevailing notion that public negative labeling effectively curbs uncivil behavior—instead, such labeling undermines team performance by diminishing interaction quality, challenging the common “fighting fire with fire” approach (Kirk et al., 2022).
Identity
I suspected that how we understand our individual and collective identities—whether we see ourselves as part of a larger system—could influence our motivation to create more humane and effective organizations. Accordingly, my dissertation and early research explored the questions “who am I” and “who are we” in organizational contexts. My coauthors and I hypothesized that professional employees (e.g., doctors, lawyers) do not uniformly respond to administrative pressure; rather, their reactions depend on the interplay between their organizational and professional identities. We found that professionals are most receptive to administrative social influence when they strongly identify with the organization but not as strongly with their profession (Hekman et al., 2009a, OB list). Conversely, when they identify more strongly with their profession than with their organization, they tend to respond unfavorably—exhibiting reduced work quality and productivity by retaliating against negative treatment and exploiting positive treatment (Hekman et al., 2009b, UTD list).
These intriguing results led my coauthors and me to challenge the notion of identification as a monolithic construct. We reconceptualized it as comprising both cognitive and affective components—finding that neurotic individuals tend to adopt a cognitive form of identification to reduce uncertainty, while extraverted individuals engage in affective identification to boost self-regard. Notably, affective identification uniquely predicts stronger organizational commitment, involvement, and citizenship behaviors (Johnson, Morgeson and Hekman, 2012). We further theorized that identification serves as a raw, motivating force that can be channeled differently depending on the perceived regulatory focus of colleagues: when a promotion focus is salient, identification drives exploratory behaviors, whereas a prevention focus steers it toward standardized actions (Hekman, van Knippenberg and Pratt, 2015, FT50 list). Finally, one of my doctoral students extended this work by exploring how small-town business communities rebuild after “act of God” disasters, revealing that such events often create strong, resentment-filled in-group/out-group identity faultlines between affected and spared business owners (Dinger et al., 2020, FT50 list).
Turnover
I was initially surprised by how negatively managers viewed turnover, assuming it was simply a natural part of organizational life. My coauthors and I began our research by showing that quitting isn’t just the outcome of a rational calculation of job satisfaction and alternatives, but a social phenomenon significantly influenced by coworkers. Using multilevel analysis, we found that colleagues’ job embeddedness and job search behaviors create a contagion effect that explains additional variance in voluntary turnover beyond traditional predictors (Felps et al., 2009, UTD list). Subsequent meta-analyses confirmed my suspicion that organizational turnover rates are uncorrelated with financial performance, prompting us to challenge the conventional view that turnover is inherently harmful. We proposed—and found evidence—that in a weak prevention climate, where organizations place less emphasis on avoiding mistakes, the negative effects of turnover can be neutralized, enabling organizations to adapt more effectively and sustain better performance when employees inevitably leave (Hekman et al., 2022, FT50 list).
Diversity
My initial exploration of diversity examined whether customer satisfaction ratings (e.g., FCQs) are influenced by race and gender bias (Hekman et al., 2010, UTD list). This award-winning study challenged the assumption that anonymous evaluations by untrained customers are objective, revealing that minority and female service employees systematically receive lower ratings with significant financial repercussions for both individuals and organizations. Building on this work, my coauthors and I then investigated how performance ratings given by supervisors to employees who publicly display diversity-valuing behavior are affected (Hekman et al., 2017, UTD list). We discovered that while such behavior is generally viewed positively, ethnic minority and female leaders are penalized with lower ratings due to entrenched negative race and sex stereotypes—an effect not observed among white and male leaders. A follow-up study further confirmed that women and minorities who advocate for diversity trigger biases that undermine their professional standing (Johnson and Hekman, 2016, FT50 list). We extended this line of research by examining academic hiring decisions in two studies (Johnson, Hekman & Chan, 2016, FT50 list), challenging the notion that a single female candidate in the pool ensures fair hiring. Instead, we found that when only one woman is present, the statistical odds are so low that she is virtually guaranteed to be overlooked, underscoring the need for a critical mass of women to overcome systemic recruitment biases.
Humility
Building on my work applying the ancient virtue of courage to modern organizations, I sought to reframe humility in a similar way. My coauthor and I challenged traditional portrayals of humility as a fixed trait by conceptualizing leader humility as a dynamic, developmental process—specifically, a set of behaviors that include admitting mistakes, praising followers’ strengths, and modeling teachability. Drawing from 55 in-depth interviews, we found that humble leaders not only model growth but also validate their followers’ developmental journeys and uncertainties, thereby driving positive outcomes and offering fresh insights into leader-follower dynamics and organizational change (Owens and Hekman, 2012, UTD list). We then extended this work across three quantitative studies to demonstrate that leader humility can spread through social contagion, fostering a collective promotion focus among team members. In doing so, we showed that humble leadership creates an emergent team state that enhances performance, offering a multilevel framework that broadens traditional leadership models (Owens and Hekman, 2016, UTD list).
Lehmann et al. (2023, OB list) continued to extend this work by reframing humility as a relationship-specific construct that can be expressed in a variety of dyadic coworker relationships, not merely leader-follower relationships. In this paper, we found that nearly half the variance in humility was relationship-specific, and when humility was expressed in a particular relationship, it enhanced psychological safety and, consequently, performance. More recently Chan, Hekman and Foo (2024, FT50 list) challenged the prevailing view that humble leaders are disadvantaged in career advancement because they lack self-promotion by showing that humility, when paired with informal career mentoring, can actually enhance a leader’s status and promotability. We argued and found that rather than being overlooked, humble leaders can leverage their mentoring relationships to achieve greater career success.
Research
Pipeline
Nearly half of the 13 Academy of Management Proceedings papers in my CV have already been converted into top-tier journal articles, and I expect several more conversions soon. For instance, by drawing on insights from the suicide literature, Leeds doctoral student Ryan Ragaglia and I continue to challenge the rational actor view of turnover and suggest turnover is often driven by impulsive, irrational factors. In our qualitative study, we uncover a type of negative attachment to one’s employer that predicts impulsive quitting. Complementing this, our quantitative study reveals that reluctant stayers often experience a toxic combination of workplace entrapment and devaluation events, which eventually leads such workers to quit impulsively. We describe this process as a “dignity tank explosion,” wherein entrapment builds pressure within each employee’s dignity tank while devaluation events simultaneously puncture it, triggering a sudden outburst of quitting.
I am advancing my research on diversity, equity, and inclusion through three new papers. Starting with diversity, we seek to examine whether women can escape gender bias by working in increasingly prevalent all women teams. Across four provocative studies conducted with Leeds doctoral student Mallory Decker, we reveal that women on all-women teams suffer from a “hive handicap” bias, where they are perceived as socially competitive—demonstrating that simply working exclusively with other women does not insulate them from gender bias.
As for equity, and together with several Leeds colleagues, we challenge a central assumption of equity theory (Adams, 1963) – specifically that overpayment inequity can boost worker performance. Instead, we find across an experiment and a field study of hundreds of executives that both underpayment and overpayment inequity trigger coworker aggression and devaluing, ultimately leading to worse performance. Our conceptual model and findings reveal that both types of pay inequity appear to undermine worker attitudes and performance.
Regarding inclusion, my Leeds colleagues and I challenge the conventional wisdom that because women tend to be more cooperative than men, merely increasing women's representation is enough to overcome destructive zero-sum competition within organizations. Indeed, we show in a study of 1,438 teams that active inclusion of women is essential for overcoming harmful cultural defaults that inhibit cooperative behavior. A key implication of this research is that genuinely including other demographic groups may unlock the unique gifts these other groups offer. For example, truly including older workers may increase organizational wisdom, including neurodiverse workers could increase organizational pattern detection, and including multilingual workers could increase organizational global sales.
Perhaps I am most passionate about extending leader humility research. In that regard I am co-founder of the Humility Research Hub—a collaborative incubator with faculty from leading business schools where we hold quarterly presentations and provide developmental feedback on our work. Currently, as lead author on a paper under review at our flagship management conference, we challenge the conventional belief that high leader humility universally boosts team performance. Instead, our findings suggest that leaders should express high humility selectively—only toward subordinates who reciprocate their humility expression—thereby reducing interpersonal opportunism and maximizing dyadic performance. All of these pipeline papers currently are or soon will be under review at UTD journals.
Conclusion
Throughout my academic career, I have consistently pursued research that identifies how to create workplaces where moral and material success reinforce rather than undermine each other. Specifically, my work has reanimated ancient virtues like courage and humility for modern organizations, pinpointing the specific behaviors managers can enact to be more courageous and humble. I have challenged the conventional view of turnover as a purely rational, inherently harmful decision, and demonstrated that identity is multifaceted—interacting with personality, perceived treatment, and organizational values to shape diverse worker behaviors. My research has also uncovered hidden biases in customer evaluations, supervisory ratings, and hiring practices, providing insight into how researchers and managers can eliminate these stubbornly persistent and illogical biases. Moreover, I have identified practical ethical strategies for managers, such as distributing indivisible stakeholder resources across decisions and addressing harmful behavior privately rather than publicly. Overall, I remain committed to developing theoretically novel and useful insights that promote worker dignity and organizational effectiveness, thereby enabling organizations to thrive both ethically and competitively in an increasingly complex world.