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Employees’ Improvisational Behavior: Exploring the Role of Leader Grit and Humility

2022; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08959285.2022.2038171

1532-7043

Arménio Rego, Andreia Vitória, Miguel Piña e Cunha, Bradley P. Owens, Ana Clara Ventura, Susana Leal, Camilo Valverde, Rui Lourenço-Gil,

Resilience and Mental Health

In spite of a growing interest for improvisation in organizations, the microfoundations of improvisation have not been theorized yet. Exploring these microfoundations, we study how employees' psychological capital (PsyCap) acts as a critical cluster of resources to face improvisational challenges and how leaders who convey grit (operationalized as perseverance of effort: Grit-PE), counterbalanced with humility, create conditions to develop those resources. By building upon the conservation of resources and the dual-systems model of self-regulation theories, our empirical studies suggest that the interaction between two leader-conveyed resources (Grit-PE and humility) creates a contextual resource that helps employees develop PsyCap, thus making them more likely to improvise. The positive effect of high Grit-PE in leaders on employees' improvisation materializes mainly when leaders also are humble.