Soothing the Ego: Self-Compassion Improves Performance via Humility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An emerging body of research indicates that expressed humility is an adaptive quality that is positively related to organizationally-relevant outcomes. However, less is known about the antecedents to expressed humility. Across three mixed-methods studies, we draw from research on self-enhancement and ego threat to explore the relationship between self-compassion, expressed humility, and interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBI). In Study 1, we show through cross-sectional self-report data that self-compassion is positively associated with OCBI, and that this relationship is mediated by expressed humility. In Study 2, we replicate this finding with peer-report data from a sample of managers attending an EMBA program. In Study 3, we use experimental methods to examine the conditions under which self-compassion is especially helpful for bolstering humility and show that it is more likely to do so in the presence of negative performance feedback (i.e., ego threatening information). These findings contribute to the nascent literature on humility in organizational settings and answer the call to better understand the antecedents to expressed humility as well as its relation with performance outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".