The Development of an Unobtrusive Measure of Humility

Individual and leader virtues have been gaining recent attention in organizational research. Humility has been identified as an essential virtue for individuals and teams to possess. However, how humility is defined and measured is largely debated and scholars agree there is a need to capture the construct of humility more unobtrusively. We use derive and develop a generic humility dictionary and use computer-aided-text analysis (CATA) to measure humility to score a modern-day Rorschach writing task. We sample 60 full-time, English-speaking individuals and score these transcripts using traditional scale measurement, hand coding, and CATA techniques. Then, using these scored transcripts, we evaluate the convergent validities between each of the measurement techniques. Last, we conclude with both theoretical and practical implications of our analyses and provide directions for future research.