Humble Leadership: Psychometric Validation of a Scale Adapted to the Peruvian Organizational Context

Abstract

Humble leadership has been recognized as a relevant style for organizational performance and well-being; however, empirical evidence on its psychometric properties comes primarily from English-speaking contexts, and validated instruments for Spanish-speaking populations, particularly in Peru, remain limited. This study aimed to psychometrically validate the Spanish-language version of the Expressed Humility Scale in a Peruvian organizational sample. We used an instrumental, non-experimental, cross-sectional design with a sample of 411 employees. We conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and assessed reliability, convergent validity, and validity based on relationships with other variables. The results revealed a unifactorial structure with nine items, factor loadings between 0.72 and 0.90, excellent fit after specifying theoretically justified error covariances (CFI = 0.990; RMSEA = 0.058), high reliability (α = 0.955; CR = 0.954), and adequate convergent validity (AVE = 0.701). Furthermore, we found a positive and significant correlation with work engagement (r = 0.53, p < 0.001), supporting its criterion validity. These findings provide a valid and reliable instrument for assessing humble leadership in the Latin American organizational context, thus helping to close a relevant methodological gap in leadership research in the region.