There is a version of confidence that looks like leadership but functions like a information blackout. The entrepreneur who projects certainty in every meeting, never admits doubt, and frames every decision as deliberate — they aren’t just performing confidence, they are systematically degrading the quality of information available to them. The research on what intellectual humility actually produces in organisations makes the cost of that performance specific and measurable.

What intellectual humility actually is

It is worth being precise because the concept gets flattened into modesty, which misses the point. Intellectual humility is a metacognitive capacity — the ability to recognise the limits of your own knowledge and beliefs. Porter and colleagues’ 2022 review in Nature Reviews Psychology, the most comprehensive synthesis across all research domains, defined it as the common element across diverse measurement approaches: a metacognitive ability to recognise the limitations of one’s beliefs and knowledge.

This matters because a founder who does not know what they do not know cannot seek the information they are missing. Intellectual humility creates the awareness that identifies the gaps, which motivates the information-seeking that closes them. The founder who says “I don’t know — who does?” is not signalling incompetence. They are demonstrating the metacognitive self-awareness that distinguishes effective from ineffective decision-making.

The decision-making research is direct. Individuals demonstrating intellectual humility show greater openness to opposing perspectives, improved belief-updating in response to new evidence, and measurably better decisions under uncertainty. For entrepreneurs operating in environments where most of the important information is still unknown, that is not a soft advantage.

What expressed humility does to teams

Brad Owens and David Hekman’s research programme at the Academy of Management is the most relevant for understanding how this plays out organisationally. Their studies — across eight lab and field samples — documented that expressed humility in leaders produces specific, measurable team outcomes: higher performance, greater learning orientation, better retention, and higher engagement.

The mechanism is contagion. When a leader admits they do not know something, they create permission for the team to do the same. Information that would otherwise be withheld — because team members fear looking incompetent in front of a leader who claims certainty — becomes shareable. The entrepreneur who models uncertainty signals that challenge is welcome. The team brings its actual knowledge rather than performing confidence back at the leader.

Owens and Hekman’s 2016 study identified collective promotion focus as the mediating mechanism — expressed leader humility orients the team toward growth and development rather than toward protecting existing positions. In early-stage companies, where the information environment is thin and uncertainty is high, that orientation is the difference between a team that surfaces problems early and one that surfaces them too late.

What overclaiming actually produces

The counterpart is worth being specific about. A leader who projects certainty signals that challenge is unwelcome. Team members rationally withhold concerns, doubts, and dissenting perspectives. The overclaiming entrepreneur ends up with less information than a humble one — not more. They have reconfigured their information environment to confirm what they already believe.

The overclaiming penalty operates through three routes. First, the metacognitive failure: research on competence and self-assessment found consistently that people with significant gaps in a domain overestimate their ability in that domain because they lack the metacognitive capacity to recognise what they are missing. They are not motivated to seek what they believe they already have. Second, feedback suppression: overconfident leaders resist constructive feedback and signal to their teams that challenge is not welcome, which breaks the feedback loop at both ends. Third, strategic rigidity: organisations frequently reward projected confidence, which means overclaiming gets reinforced precisely as its costs accumulate invisibly.

The Dunning-Kruger research, which documents the inverse relationship between competence and self-assessed competence, is worth presenting with appropriate caution — subsequent replication attempts have found the effect is smaller than originally reported, and methodological critics have challenged the original paradigm. The core pattern — that metacognitive gaps produce overestimation — is well-supported. The dramatic version of the original claim is less so.

The practical shift

The performance advantage of intellectual humility is not produced by being less confident. It is produced by being accurately confident — knowing what you know, knowing what you do not, and being transparent about both.

Three specific practices the research points toward. First, making “I don’t know” a normal part of the decision vocabulary rather than a signal of weakness. Owens’ research found that expressed humility is contagious — the leader’s behaviour becomes the team norm within months. Second, actively attributing team success to the people responsible rather than to the leader’s vision. This is not false modesty — it is one of the three behavioural dimensions of expressed humility that Owens’ research found predicts team retention and learning orientation. Third, asking genuine questions in situations where the instinct is to assert. Edgar Schein’s research on humble inquiry found that the quality of information a leader receives is a direct function of how much permission they grant others to challenge them.

The entrepreneur who is most certain they have things figured out is, according to the research, also the entrepreneur whose team is most likely to be withholding the information that would update that certainty. That is not a comfortable finding. It is a useful one.

A book worth reading alongside this

Good to Great by Jim Collins is the most rigorous starting point. Collins’ matched-pair analysis of eleven companies that made the transition from good to great found, consistently and counterintuitively, that the most effective leaders combined personal humility with fierce professional will. The humility finding was one of his most unexpected results and maps directly onto what the research in this article establishes. For any entrepreneur who associates projected confidence with effective leadership, it is the most direct empirical challenge to that assumption.

This article discusses psychological patterns documented in research on leadership, cognition, and organisational behaviour. It is not designed to identify, diagnose, or assess any psychological condition, and it is not a substitute for professional support. The patterns described here are well-documented features of leadership and decision-making — recognising yourself in them is not a cause for alarm. If these patterns are significantly affecting your team, relationships, or wellbeing, speaking with an organisational psychologist can provide personalised guidance that an article cannot.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing significant psychological distress, please consult a qualified mental health professional.

Sources: Porter, T. et al. (2022), Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(9). Owens, B.P., Johnson, M.D. & Mitchell, T.R. (2013), Organization Science, 24(5). Owens, B.P. & Hekman, D.R. (2012), Academy of Management Journal, 55(4). Owens, B.P. & Hekman, D.R. (2016), Academy of Management Journal, 59(3). Dunning, D. & Kruger, J. (1999), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6). Edmondson, A.C. (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2).