Fostering Innovation Through Humble Leadership and Humble Organizational Culture

Abstract

Companies understand they need to innovate to stay competitive, but innovation is not as simple as thinking of a great idea and then implementing it. Successful innovation requires supportive actions from leaders and the firm especially when the innovation is complex. In order to foster complex technological innovations, such as robotic process automation (“RPA”), we propose that firms benefit from having (1) humble leadership actions and (2) a humble organizational culture. We share what we learned about our propositions after reviewing the Finance Controllership division within a major multinational technology organization that develops hardware and other computer-related support items.