Humanistic leadership in organizations: concept clarification, scale development and validation

Abstract

As firms face global challenges, the limitations of traditional management theories with a sole focus on wealth and profit growth are becoming increasingly apparent. A growing number of scholars and practitioners have called for a new perspective on the management paradigm and advocated for integrating humanistic principles into business practices. Rooted in humanism, humanistic leadership (HL) is a new leadership paradigm that treats employees as holistic human beings and pursues the common good. Although a few studies have explored HL practices in various cultural contexts, there is still a lack of formal dimension construction and measurement development. This PhD thesis aims to clarify the concept and develop the measurement of HL to facilitate the development of HL.

The first chapter introduces the research questions, contributions, philosophical foundations, and ethical considerations of this thesis.

Chapter 2 clarifies the concept of HL and distinguishes it from other leadership styles through a systematic literature review. HL is defined as “the holistic development of the self and followers and the guidance toward achieving the integral common good for multiple stakeholders”. There are five dimensions of HL: 1) Self-cultivation; 2) Humanistic care; 3) Humanistic education; 4) Equality and respect; 5) Working harmoniously with all parties.

The measurement tool for HL, the Humanistic Leadership Scale (HLS), is developed in Chapter 3. A 43-item pool for the HLS was developed through both deductive and inductive approaches. After content validity assessment and exploratory factor analysis, the pool was reduced to 19 items. Confirmatory factor analysis shows a good fit with CFI = 0.97; TLI = 0.96; RMSEA = 0.06; SRMR = 0.04. The standardized factor loadings for all 19 items exceeded 0.70, ranging from 0.781 to 0.902.

The concurrent validity of the HLS is further tested in Chapter 4 through examining the relationship between humanistic leadership and followers’ sustainable lifestyle habits. The results show that HL is indirectly and positively related to followers’ sustainable lifestyle habits through a chain mediation process involving pro-social values and person-organization value congruence.

This thesis contributes to the literature through the development and validation of the HLS, thereby providing a reliable measurement instrument for future theory development and empirical examination of humanistic leadership. It also extends sustainability research by exploring a positive indirect linkage between humanistic leadership and followers’ sustainable lifestyle habits through value-based mechanisms. Practically, the HLS offers organizations a tool to assess and cultivate humanistic leadership capabilities. In addition, the empirical findings show a way of advancing sustainability through humanistic leadership practices and followers’ habits cultivation.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Pingping Fu (Supervisor) & Jim Mao (Supervisor)