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

Organizations often have to improvise to deal with and capitalize on changing conditions. It is thus crucial that employees improvise and contribute to their organization’s adaptability. However, the microfoundations of organizational improvisation have not been studied. Exploring these microfoundations, we study employees’ psychological capital (PsyCap) as a critical cluster of resources to face improvisational challenges and how leaders who convey grit counterbalanced with humility create conditions to develop those resources. Through three studies, we show that conveyed leader grit predicts employees’ improvisational behavior through their PsyCap, and this indirect effect is moderated by leader-expressed humility, in that the positive effect of a high level of conveyed grit in leaders on employees’ improvisational behaviors materializes mainly when the leader also expresses a high degree of humility. <b></b>