Small and medium-sized businesses often have less money, time and organisational capacity for formal employee development than large companies. That makes an everyday management question unusually important: can the way a leader behaves help employees take more responsibility for developing their own skills?
A new four-wave study of 368 employees in 83 teams in Shandong Province, China, suggests that humble leadership is associated with greater employee self-development, but the mechanism appears more complicated than simply giving people more freedom at work.
Researchers Aiqi Zhang and Juhee Hahn found that teams whose leaders were perceived as more humble also reported higher job autonomy and intrinsic motivation. The strongest indirect pathway ran from humble leadership to autonomy, from autonomy to intrinsic motivation, and then to self-development. Autonomy on its own did not significantly explain the cross-level link between leadership and development.
The distinction matters for managers. Giving employees discretion may create room to learn, but room to act is not necessarily the same as wanting to use that room for long-term growth.
Why humility could matter in smaller firms
The study defines humble leadership through behaviours such as acknowledging personal limitations, appreciating employees’ strengths and remaining open to learning. This differs from leadership approaches centred primarily on vision, inspiration or formal delegation. The researchers argue that humility may be particularly relevant to self-development because learning often requires employees to admit gaps in their own knowledge, seek feedback and risk making mistakes.
In a workplace where leaders behave as though they must always be correct, employees may infer that displaying uncertainty is risky. A leader who openly learns from others may send a different signal: improvement is legitimate, questions are acceptable and expertise can come from elsewhere in the team.
Zhang and Hahn combine two theoretical perspectives. Social information processing theory proposes that employees use cues from the workplace to judge which behaviours are accepted and valued. The job demands-resources perspective treats supportive leadership and autonomy as resources that can help employees respond to demands, learn and remain motivated.
This is especially relevant in SMEs, where formal training systems may be limited and roles can be flexible. In such settings, day-to-day leader behaviour may carry more weight in shaping whether employees believe independent problem solving and continuous learning are genuinely encouraged.
Four surveys separated leadership, autonomy, motivation and development
The researchers collected data from employees in Chinese SMEs, mainly in manufacturing, services and technology-related industries. Most participating firms had fewer than 300 employees. The initial wave included 550 employee questionnaires from 110 teams.
Only respondents who completed all four waves, used consistent anonymous identification codes and could be matched to valid teams were retained. Teams also needed at least three fully matched employees. The final analytical sample therefore contained 368 employees nested within 83 teams, with between three and eight employees per team and an average team size of 4.43.
The final sample was almost evenly divided by gender, with 182 men, or 49.5%, and 186 women, or 50.5%. Employees aged 36 to 50 formed the largest age group at 38.3%, while 38.0% of participants held a bachelor’s degree, the largest education category.
The design deliberately separated the focal measures in time. Employees rated humble leadership from 3 to 8 April 2023. Job autonomy was measured from 14 to 19 April, intrinsic motivation from 26 April to 1 May, and self-development from 8 to 13 May. The roughly one-week gaps were intended to reduce common-method concerns and establish a clearer temporal order, although they do not turn the observational study into a causal experiment.
Humble leadership was measured with nine items, job autonomy with three, intrinsic motivation with six and self-development with five. Internal consistency was acceptable across all four measures, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.894, 0.830, 0.868 and 0.838 respectively.
Employees within teams largely agreed about leader humility
Because humble leadership was treated as a team-level characteristic, the researchers first had to show that employees reporting to the same leader shared sufficiently similar perceptions. The mean within-team agreement statistic was 0.949. The intraclass correlation was 0.691 for ICC(1) and 0.908 for ICC(2), while differences between teams were statistically significant, F = 10.909, p < 0.001.
Those results supported aggregating individual ratings into a team-level humble leadership measure. This is important because the analysis was not simply asking whether one optimistic employee happened to rate both a leader and personal development favourably. It explicitly modelled leadership as a shared team perception and the other experiences at individual and team levels.
A four-factor measurement model separating humble leadership, autonomy, intrinsic motivation and self-development also fitted the data strongly, with CFI = 0.995, TLI = 0.994, RMSEA = 0.016 and SRMR = 0.033. A one-factor model performed far worse, with CFI = 0.570 and RMSEA = 0.142. Harman’s single-factor test found that the first unrotated factor accounted for 33.1% of variance.
These checks reduce, but do not eliminate, concern that the results merely reflect a single common response tendency.
Humble leadership showed a direct link to self-development
The researchers used multilevel structural equation modelling in Mplus and controlled at the individual level for gender, age, education and monthly income.
At the between-team level, humble leadership was positively associated with self-development, with an unstandardised estimate of 0.250, standard error 0.098, p = 0.011 and a 95% confidence interval from 0.057 to 0.442. Humble leadership was even more strongly associated with job autonomy, estimate 0.646, p < 0.001, and was positively associated with intrinsic motivation, estimate 0.246, p = 0.015.
At the individual level, autonomy was positively related to self-development, estimate 0.141, p = 0.002. Intrinsic motivation showed a larger positive association with self-development, estimate 0.349, p < 0.001. Autonomy was also related to intrinsic motivation both within teams, estimate 0.209, and between teams, estimate 0.373, with both relationships significant at p < 0.001.
The model was not flawless. Its CFI was 0.940, but TLI was 0.684 and RMSEA was 0.094. The authors explicitly note that some global fit indices were not uniformly strong and retained the model because it represented the theoretically specified multilevel mediation structure. That qualification is important when interpreting the pathway estimates.
Autonomy mattered, but autonomy alone was not the bridge
The most informative result came from the mediation analysis. The indirect pathway from humble leadership through job autonomy alone was not statistically significant. Its estimate was -0.049, p = 0.549, with a 95% confidence interval from -0.208 to 0.111.
By contrast, the indirect pathway through intrinsic motivation was significant, estimate 0.163, p = 0.034, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.012 to 0.314.
Most notably, the sequential path from humble leadership to job autonomy, then intrinsic motivation, then self-development was significant. The estimate was 0.159, standard error 0.061, p = 0.009, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.039 to 0.279. The total indirect effect was 0.273, p = 0.004, and the total effect was 0.523, p < 0.001.
A sensitivity analysis removing the demographic controls produced a similar pattern. The sequential indirect effect remained significant at 0.150, p = 0.012, while the autonomy-only indirect effect remained non-significant. That consistency strengthens confidence that the main mediation pattern was not created by the included demographic controls.
The findings therefore suggest a useful distinction between opportunity and motivation. Autonomy may give employees discretion to change methods, solve problems and pursue learning. Yet at the team level, that discretion did not by itself statistically connect humble leadership with self-development. The data were more consistent with a pathway in which autonomy helps cultivate intrinsic motivation, which in turn is associated with sustained development behaviour.
What SME managers can take from the findings
For smaller businesses, the results point toward a development strategy that is broader than sending employees on courses. Leaders can model learning by admitting mistakes, asking for input and recognising expertise elsewhere in the team. Managers can also give employees meaningful discretion over how work is completed.
But the study cautions against treating autonomy as an automatic development programme. Employees may have freedom without seeing learning as interesting, meaningful or worth sustained effort. Managers who want autonomy to translate into growth may also need to connect tasks to purpose, make feedback useful and create opportunities for employees to experience progress.
This has particular relevance as digital tools and artificial intelligence alter job requirements. The study itself did not measure AI adoption or technological disruption, so it cannot show that humble leadership improves adaptation to AI. Its narrower contribution is evidence that a learning-oriented leadership climate, perceived discretion and intrinsic motivation are linked to self-development in a sample of SME employees.
Important limits keep the results associative
The four-wave design is stronger than a single cross-sectional survey because the variables were measured at different times, but it still cannot establish causation. Employees supplied all focal measures, leaving room for common-source and social-desirability bias despite anonymity, temporal separation and measurement checks.
The study also did not measure employee tenure, and the structural model produced mixed global fit statistics. The sample came only from SMEs in Shandong Province, limiting confidence that the same relationships would hold in other Chinese regions, countries, industries or large organisations.
Other mechanisms could also matter. Psychological safety, learning orientation, feedback-seeking climate and formal career support were not included in the tested mediation chain. Future experiments, longer longitudinal studies and multi-source designs could help establish whether changing leader behaviour actually causes employees to develop more actively.
Even with those cautions, the study offers a practical refinement to a familiar management idea. Giving employees freedom appears useful, but development may depend on whether that freedom becomes internally meaningful. In this sample, humble leadership was linked to self-development most clearly when autonomy and intrinsic motivation formed part of the same pathway.
Source Information
Study: Zhang, A. & Hahn, J. (2026). Humble leadership and employee self-development in SMEs: a four-wave multilevel study of job autonomy and intrinsic motivation.
Journal: BMC Psychology
Published: 28 September 2026
DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05672-2
Study type: Four-wave observational survey with multilevel structural equation modelling
Sample: 368 employees nested within 83 SME teams in Shandong Province, China
