Intellectual Humility in the Workplace

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1		Nhung Hendy	--	454	2024-12-19 07:29:57	\|
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Peer Reviewed

This is a peer-reviewed entry published in Encyclopedia Journal, full entry can be found at 10.3390/encyclopedia4040121

Intellectual humility (IH), defined as the extent to which one is aware of one’s own intellectual limitations, is an understudied construct in organizational research. As a moral virtue, IH has been studied in philosophy and religion for decades. As a psychological and behavioral tendency construct, IH has gained significant attention among psychology researchers over the past decade due to rising extremism regarding social and political issues in the US and around the world. One reason for the increased research interest in IH includes the potential benefits from IH in terms of reducing social and political polarization and reducing stress and anxiety, which may improve individual overall well-being. This entry provides an overview of IH as a multi-dimensional construct, its psychometric properties and nomological network, and its potential benefits in organizations and employee well-being. The entry concludes with a call for more interdisciplinary research on improving our knowledge and theories of IH as well as its construct measurement considering the recent coming-of-age adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) models to harness the power of IH in sustaining individual well-being.

intellectual humility positive psychology construct measurement

As technologies continue to transform the labor market, the fear of jobs being replaced by AI has grown significantly, compounded by social and environmental pressures. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report released in May 2023, there is expected to be a net loss of 14 million jobs due to AI (^[1] www.weforum.org (accessed on 8 August 2024)). The proportion of working adults in the US reportedly feeling anxious has grown from 32% in 2022 to 37% in 2023 to 43% in 2024 based on the most recent annual survey conducted by the American Psychiatry Association (^[2] psychiatry.org (accessed on 8 August 2024)). Social media have been viewed as creating echo chambers (e.g., ^[3]), spreading online misinformation while reinforcing individual beliefs even though they might be inaccurate (e.g., ^[4]), resulting in social and political polarization. Against this backdrop, the latest survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) showed that 53% of surveyed US workers deemed society to be uncivil ^[5]. Because workplace incivility and politics can be a type of chronic stress ^[6], it is important to cultivate and sustain employee well-being.

In this entry, the author present intellectual humility (IH) as an antidote to social and political acrimony as well as a potential tonic to individual well-being. Although IH has been studied in religion and philosophy for decades, this construct has only been systematically examined in psychology within the past ten years ^[7]. To this end, the entry starts with the definition of IH, followed by a review of this concept’s psychometric properties, its place within extant nomological network, and its outcome prediction. The entry concludes with suggestions for future directions in organizational and management research.

References

World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2023. Available online: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf (accessed on 8 August 2024).
American Psychiatric Association. American Adults Express Increasing Anxiousness in Annual Poll; Stress and Sleep Are Key Factors Impacting Mental Health. 2024. Available online: https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/annual-poll-adults-express-increasing-anxiousness (accessed on 8 August 2024).
Boutyline, A.; Willer, R. The social structure of political echo chambers: Variation in ideological homophily in online networks. Political Psychol. 2017, 38, 551–569.
Hilbert, M. Toward a synthesis of cognitive biases: How noisy information processing can bias human decision making. Psychol. Bull. 2012, 138, 211–237.
Agovino, T. Minding manners: Tackling incivility for a better work experience. HR Q. 2024, 69, 26–32.
Abrams, Z. Managing political stress. Monit. Psychol. 2024, 10, 26–29.
Porter, T.; Baldwin, C.R.; Warren, M.T.; Murray, E.D.; Cotton Bronk, K.; Forgeard, M.J.C.; Snow, N.E.; Jayawickreme, E. Clarifying the content of intellectual humility: A systematic review and integrative framework. J. Personal. Assess. 2022, 104, 573–585.

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Subjects: Cultural Studies

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Nhung Hendy

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Online Date: 19 Dec 2024

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