Seminar – Running head: Promoting leader humility through recalling one’s mistakes

Professor Jasmine Hu, The Ohio State University

In the presentation, I will first briefly summarise my research interests and then introduce a working paper (Hu, Zhang, & Lount) on leader humility. Making mistakes is an inevitable part of leadership, but little is known about how and when leaders benefit from reflecting on their missteps. Drawing on experiential learning theory we propose that having leaders recall a past mistake can help them formulate plans for learning and encourage them to express humility. Leaders’ expressed humility creates a common experience for their teams to improve, which ultimately produce team performance. We detail how recalling a prior mistake that one learned from, should elicit leader humility, and highlight that this relationship will be stronger for leaders with a higher promotion focus. Across four studies (ie, two scenario-based experiments with 806 managerial leaders, a laboratory experiment with 210 student leaders and team members, and a daily field experiment with 85 managers), we find support for the proposed relationships. We contribute to the leader humility and teams literatures by shedding light on the value of leaders reflecting on their prior mistakes, and how the teams they manage can perform better as a result.

Speaker bio

Jia (Jasmine) Hu is a Full Professor of Management and Denman Scholar at the Fisher College of Business, the Ohio State University. Jasmine also coordinates the Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources (OBHR) PhD program at Fisher. Previously, Jasmine served on the faculty of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, where she was named as a J. Donnelly Fellow in Participatory Management. Jasmine received her Ph.D. with concentrations in OBHR from University of Illinois at Chicago. Jasmine’s primary research interests focus on understanding prosocial leadership and teams. Her research is driven by fundamental questions facing modern organisations: What prosocial leadership qualities and behaviours help improve teams’ long-term effectiveness? And why, how, and when do they have a prosocial impact? Jasmine’s work has appeared in leading management journals such as the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), Personnel Psychology (PPsych), Leadership Quarterly, and Harvard Business Review. Her research and insights have also been mentioned in numerous media outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to a comprehensive analysis of 3,190 authors whose leadership research was published in top ten management journals from 1990 to 2017 (Zhao & Li, 2019, Leadership Quarterly), Jasmine ranks among the top 10 most productive leadership scholars in the field of Organizational Behaviour between 2011 and 2017. Jasmine currently serves as a deputy editor of Management and Organizational Review and on the editorial boards of seven leading management journals including AMJ, JAP, OBHDP, PPsych, Journal of Management, Human Relations, and Journal of Organizational Behaviour. Jasmine’s primary teaching responsibility includes the Leadership core course for the full-time MBA program, Leadership Legacy course for the Dean’s leadership academy program, and advanced seminars for the OBHR PhD program. Jasmine was named as a “Best Reviewer of the Year” by PPsych in 2019 and a “Best 40 under 40 Professor” by Poets and Quants in 2021. In terms of consulting and applied experiences, Jasmine served as a consultant for Accenture (China) and McKinsey & Company (US) and conducted a number of field research in various companies from different industries and cultural settings.