Leadership Humility in Expert-Dominated Project Teams

Eric Kearney

Leadership Humility in Expert-Dominated Project Teams

Author(s)	Dr. Eric Kearney
Country	United States
Abstract	Expert-dominated project teams depend on specialized knowledge, yet the concentration of expertise and professional status can create interpersonal conditions in which technically valuable contributions are unevenly heard, challenged, or integrated. Formal project leaders face a distinctive challenge in such teams: they must coordinate specialists whose knowledge may exceed their own while preserving sufficient authority to maintain direction, accountability, and timely decision making. This study examines leadership humility as a potential mechanism for balancing these requirements. Leadership humility is conceptualized through accurate self-appraisal, acknowledgment of limitations, appreciation of others' strengths, and openness to learning. Existing research associates expressed leader humility with constructive team processes, collective psychological resources, shared leadership, information exchange, and team performance. The present study extends this literature by focusing specifically on project teams characterized by strong expertise differentiation and status concentration. Because no primary organizational dataset was supplied, a simulation-based explanatory design was adopted. Synthetic scenarios representing varying levels of leader humility were evaluated through indices of psychological safety, expert voice, knowledge integration, status concentration, and project effectiveness. The simulated analysis shows knowledge-integration effectiveness increasing from 49 to 85 as the leadership-humility condition rises from 32 to 81, while project effectiveness increases from 56 to 87 and dysfunctional status concentration declines. The results are methodological illustrations rather than empirical estimates. The study argues that humility does not require leaders to surrender decision authority; instead, it can make authority more epistemically adaptive by helping leaders recognize where relevant knowledge resides, invite challenge, redistribute conversational space, and coordinate specialized expertise. The proposed framework offers a basis for future empirical studies of multidisciplinary engineering, technology, healthcare, research, consulting, and other knowledge-intensive project environments
Keywords	leadership humility, expert teams, project teams, psychological safety, knowledge integration, professional status, employee voice, shared leadership
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 5, Issue 1, January-February 2024
Published On	2024-01-02

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Leadership Humility in Expert-Dominated Project Teams

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