Research Roundup: Humility at the Top, Motivating Your Staff, Retailer-Brand Relationships, and More

New research on topics ranging from leadership to AI are instrumental for making decisions about your career and your business. To help, we’ve collected a handful of useful and surprising findings from across academia, consultancies, and other vetted sources, including: Why you should lead with humility. How to motivate workers when they’re assigned tedious or challenging tasks. How retailers respond when their suppliers start selling directly to customers. For some of these research briefs, we’ve also included links to related HBR.org articles for an opportunity to dig deeper into the practical takeaways. Humility at the Top Inspires Others to Lead When executives acknowledge mistakes, give credit to their teams, or engage in other humble behaviors, it helps build a culture of trust. Now new research shows that it can also ignite employees’ desire to become leaders themselves. In a field study 216 pairs of supervisors and employees in China filled out three sets of surveys, each a few weeks apart. The employees rated how willing their supervisors were to admit mistakes, how open they seemed to feedback, and how much they appeared to value their staff’s contributions in the previous weeks. The employees also noted how strong their own desire for growth and achievement was and how highly regarded they felt in their organizations. The supervisors, meanwhile, rated how motivated each employee was to lead and how often that person took charge of a project or situation. The researchers found that the more supervisors exhibited humility, the more highly regarded their employees felt, which in turn increased their leadership ambitions. The effect was especially strong among highly individualistic employees, who prioritize personal uniqueness and growth (in contrast to collectivist employees, who prioritize group harmony over personal recognition). To see whether these findings held true in Western cultures, which tend to have a higher concentration of individualistic workers, the researchers conducted a follow-up survey with 210 participants in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They found the same pattern: Humble leaders made others want to lead. “Behaviors [that exhibit] self-awareness, appreciation of others’ contributions, and teachability…signal respect and recognition,” which can help employees gain the confidence that they have what it takes to lead, the researchers write. Go deeper: “Research: Humble Leaders Inspire Others to Step Up,” by Xiaoshuang Lin and Herman Tse. Rudeness at Work Silences Women More Than Men Disrespectful behavior on the job—like shooting someone’s idea down hastily or interrupting a colleague who’s speaking—might not be malicious. But a new study found that it can have a major impact on women’s willingness to speak up. Researchers ran an online experiment with 654 participants from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. They told the participants they would each work for a few minutes with a group in an online chatroom to come up with a creative name for a product. Unbeknownst to the participants, the other group members’ comments were preprogrammed responses created by the researchers. Half the participants received responses to their ideas that were civil. The other half received rude responses, such as, “Umm…that actually sounds really boring. Why don’t we suggest something fun?” The rude remarks appeared to come from both male and female colleagues. The participants then were told to imagine they worked at a company with the same group. The researchers asked how comfortable they’d feel voicing new ideas or concerns, how likely they thought they’d be to experience backlash to a bad idea, and whether they’d withhold insights in the future. Men and women in the polite group were equally willing to share new ideas and anticipated little backlash. But in the uncivil group, women were significantly less at ease sharing their thoughts, more likely to anticipate hostile reactions to weak ideas, and more likely to say they’d keep their insights or concerns to themselves. The researchers obtained similar findings in a follow-up survey with 2,528 participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, who were asked to report the levels of incivility they experienced in their actual workplaces and to rate their willingness to share ideas. Women are disproportionately impacted by rudeness because it signals a high likelihood that they’ll be punished socially for behavior deemed inappropriate to their gender—like speaking up, asserting an opinion, or disagreeing with someone else’s analysis, say the study’s authors. Managers who want to benefit from the diverse insights of their staff must make sure they’re creating respectful environments free of even mundane kinds of incivility. Go deeper: “Research: Incivility at Work Silences Everyone, But Especially Women,” by Kristin Bain et al. To Motivate Workers, Reward Them for “Streaks” If your employees struggle to persist at challenging or tedious projects, offering them incentives for maintaining streaks on the job can help them, new research shows. Across six experiments with with 4,504 U.S. participants, researchers tested whether gradually increasing incentives for consecutive work encouraged them to complete more tasks. In one study the researchers asked 999 people to imagine that they worked for a food delivery service and were tired after delivering many items that day. The participants in one group were told that they’d receive a stable bonus (1.25 times their usual rate) for every additional delivery they made. People in the other group were told that their bonus would increase with additional deliveries (1.15 times for one more, 1.20 for two, and 1.25 for the third and any subsequent delivery after that). When asked to predict how many extra deliveries they’d make before taking a break, participants in the second group said they’d make significantly more deliveries than those in the stable bonus condition did. In another experiment the researchers gave 423 participants the option of decoding CAPTCHA images for small amounts of money or watching funny videos for no money. Half the participants were offered a stable incentive for decoding each CAPTCHA. The other half were offered increasing incentives, but if they took a break and watched a video, their reward would reset to a low rate and they’d have to build it up again. The researchers then asked the participants how committed they felt to the goal of maximizing their earnings and recorded how many tasks they chose to complete before taking a break. Those in the increasing incentives condition completed the most tasks, took the fewest breaks, and reported the highest level of commitment to their goal. Whether managers are trying to persuade workers to make more sales calls, input more lines of code, or learn a new but challenging skill, increasing incentives can be a useful way to help people forge on despite boredom or fatigue, the researchers write. Apologies Can Be Good for the Bottom Line Companies often send emails apologizing for things like customer service snafus or mistaken information in prior messages. But does saying you’re sorry have any impact on how customers feel about your brand? Researchers conducted four studies to determine whether apologizing for a trivial mistake by email leads to more-favorable customer evaluations than not apologizing for it. In one study the researchers partnered with Sacha, a large footwear company that operates in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands and has a strong online presence. Sacha sent out two versions of an email campaign: In one the subject line was “sorry” and in the other it was “good news.” Except for that difference, the content and length of both email campaigns were identical. More customers opened the email with an apology in the subject line (38%) than the one touting good news (29%), which admitted the error but didn’t apologize for it. More customers also clicked on links in the email with an apology header (5.29%) than in the one with the good-news subject line (4.67%). And finally, the apology email generated dramatically more revenue (€628.74) than the good-news email (€277.13). Across the four studies, the researchers determined that when companies express regret for minor errors, it makes customers feel more positively toward them. It increases the perceived warmth of the company without making it seem less competent. However, if a company is already seen as very warm, apologizing for small mistakes doesn’t have as much impact. The researchers suggest it may be beneficial for companies to precede email offers of incentives with an apology for a trivial mistake. But they should be careful about the nature of the slip-ups they disclose. Apologizing for significant mistakes doesn’t improve perceived warmth and can reduce perceived competence, leading to negative attitudes toward a company, the authors write. People Dislike Pushy Referrals Your company has probably sent thousands of messages urging customers to recommend your product to their friends. But have you stopped to test whether any of them actually get results? In 2022 researchers conducted four studies involving 61,401 Chinese consumers to investigate how the language used in referral messages affected consumer participation in referral reward programs. In one of them the researchers created two types of SMS text referral messages: an assertive message and a less assertive message. Each customer was randomly asked to share one of the two messages. The researchers tracked how many customers clicked on the link in the text to view the referral-program details and how many then sent the message to their friends. Almost 11% of the customers clicked on the link. Among that group, 0.94% of customers shared the assertive message, and 1.6% shared the less assertive message. To counteract some of the resistance customers may have to assertive language, the researchers recommend highlighting product benefits in referral messages. In a related study researchers recruited 499 participants and asked them to imagine that they had recently purchased and were satisfied with a product called Herbal Tea. The researchers created two types of referral messages: One was assertive (“You must try Herbal Tea! Nice product, you must try it!”), and one was less assertive (“It’s worth trying Herbal Tea. Nice product, it’s worth trying”). In addition, they crafted two versions of the product description: one emphasizing a positive attribute (“Herbal Tea for Improving Your Brain Power!”) and a control (“Herbal Tea”). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: assertive message with the benefit highlighted, assertive message with the control description, less assertive message with the benefit highlighted, and less assertive message with the control description. The participants then rated their likelihood of referring the product on a scale from one to three. The researchers found that participants were less likely to refer the product when the message was assertive. However, when the benefit of the product was highlighted, participants were more likely to make a referral, regardless of the assertiveness of the message. Though the likelihood was still lower with an assertive message than with a less assertive one when the benefits was highlighted, the negative effect of an assertive tone was mitigated. When Suppliers Sell Direct to Consumers, Relations with Retailers Suffer When a supplier launches its own consumer-facing website, how do its retail partners respond? A new study suggests that they disengage from the supplier. Researchers examined the ordering behavior of 2,625 French, Spanish, and UK retailers after their supplier—a large German toy company—launched online shops in France and the United Kingdom. (The Spanish retailers were analyzed as a control group.) The researchers found that in the following months, the UK and French retailers reduced their orders by 19%, on average, and paid 21% higher wholesale prices. This suggests that they were no longer invested in their relationship with the supplier—that they’d stopped negotiating for better prices and stocking a wide range of items. The UK and French retailers also pivoted toward the supplier’s more popular items—indicating that they continued to stock what they knew would sell but no longer took risks on the rest of the company’s product lines. Not all retailers disengaged to the same degree, however. The researchers determined that large retailers reduced their orders substantially less than small retailers did. A survey of 138 of the original 2,625 retailers revealed that when retailers are large and powerful, they’re less likely to perceive the launch of a supplier’s online shop as a competitive threat and retaliate only minimally compared with small retailers. Suppliers contemplating changes to their distribution strategies should consider how they might affect retailers of different sizes, the researchers write. While relationships with large retailers may not suffer much, they contend, suppliers who want to stay on good terms with small customers should think about offering them lower wholesale prices or products that are different from those sold on their direct-to-consumer sites. Go deeper: “Research: How Retailers Respond When Brands Start Selling Direct,” by Michiel Van Crombrugge et al. Search Engines Don’t Change Your Views—They Reinforce Them Despite what you might think, looking up information online is unlikely to alter people’s opinions of things. That’s because your preexisting beliefs have a major impact on the results you get from search engines like Google or Bing. If you believe caffeine is unhealthful, for example, you’ll tend to use search terms like “risks of caffeine.” If you think nuclear energy is good, you’ll be likely to query the “benefits of nuclear energy.” Because search algorithms surface the answers most relevant to the terms you type, the results typically confirm what you thought in the first place. And that makes it harder for people to discover broader perspectives and learn, according to the authors of 21 global studies. Beginning in 2020 researchers asked nearly 10,000 people to search on Google, Bing, and custom-built search engines and chatbots that were designed to test specific interventions. In 2023 they added gen AI tools like ChatGPT—which people are increasingly using instead of traditional engines—to the experiments. Analyzing searches across a variety of subjects, they observed that prior beliefs tended to persist after a search, mostly because of people’s tendency to base search terms on those beliefs. However, in one of the studies the researchers developed a custom search engine designed to provide people with a broader set of information. They recruited 1,002 participants to test whether its results reduced the effects of narrow, biased searches. The subjects first read a passage about the debate over whether younger or older people make better leaders, which focused on people’s cognitive abilities. Then they were instructed to use the search engine to explore the relationship between mental acuity and age. The search engine, without the participants’ knowledge, displayed one of two sets of 10 search results: The first was based on the participant-generated term, and the second was broader, combining multiple perspectives. Participants reviewed the results, rated their beliefs about how age affects thinking ability, and evaluated the usefulness and relevance of the search results. The study found that the people who were shown balanced search results were much less likely to believe that age was an important factor in how a well a leader thinks than participants shown results based on their own search terms were. Companies hoping to turn their own search engines or gen AI chatbots into unbiased information sources should consider several fixes. Providing people a more-diverse set of results may help, the research indicates. But the authors also suggest that companies program their search and AI algorithms to mitigate confirmation bias, promote new thinking, and foster more broadly informed decision-making. Are Employees Hiding Gen AI Use? Sixty-eight percent of employers do not provide “full, unrestricted access” to gen AI-based tools for work. Still, 75% of employees claim to be using it, according to an Accenture survey of 3,450 C-suite leaders and 3,000 non-C-suite-level employees from the world’s largest global organizations, conducted from October to December 2024.( “Accenture Pulse of Change, 2025.”) CEO Departures Are Increasing Last year 202 global CEOs left their posts, surpassing the six-year average of 186 and reflecting a 13% increase over 2023. (“The Transformation of the CEO: Global CEO Turnover Index Annual Report,” by Russell Reynolds Associates.) These research write-ups are adapted from the July-August 2025 issue of our magazine.

Research Roundup: Humility at the Top, Motivating Your Staff, Retailer-Brand Relationships, and More

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