Intra-Organizational Humility: A Core Competency in New Century’s Organization Leadership

Humility is one of the fundamental virtues mentioned in most philosophical, religious, and, scientific texts. Recently, as the base of virtue, it has also gained a special place in organizational and management studies. The purpose of this research is to provide a comprehensive view of the concept of humility in the content of organization and management. In this exploratory mixed-method research, in order to understand the concept of humility, in the content of organization and management, the researchers used grounded theory strategy (GT) and to validate the indicators and concept, survey strategy was used. For this purpose, 12 human resources managers working in the banking industry in Iran were interviewed. Through coding techniques, the key concepts were identified and categorized. Data collection was done through distributing questionnaires to 200 employees and the collected data were analyzed using confirming factor analysis. Finally, the organizational humility was modeled within three areas: cognitive aspect related to knowledge and ontology, affective aspect related to attitude and epistemology, and behavioral aspect related to observing the pragmatism methodology. The results of the study, confirming the validity of the instrument, showed that the understanding of the bank's managers of humility is supported by espoused theories and theory in use, but the epistemic and content barriers prevented the maximum use of this competence.