The Contributing Role of Reflexivity to Innovation in Tech Teams: How Leader Humility and Team Proactivity Can Facilitate The Process

Abstract: As most companies and organizations rely on their tech teams to drive their business, staying innovative becomes a crucial challenge in this context. The present study explores this strive for innovation by considering team reflexivity, defined as the ability of a group to communicate and ponder together. This concept is placed at the center of the proposed theoretical model, acting as a mediator between personal behaviors and innovation. In particular, the theoretical model places leader expressed humility and team proactivity as fueling factors for reflexivity. Besides this, the role of psychological safety is also investigated to explore the significance of this phenomenon. To support the proposed model, the thesis presents a field study including 33 tech teams from all over Europe, which serves the purpose to determine the statistical relationship between the variables. The analysis includes results from SPSS PROCESS and SmartPLS. The main findings indicate that leader humility and team proactivity have a positive correlation with reflexivity and that these three variables are positively correlated with innovation. Additionally, the positive relationship between psychological safety and innovation is confirmed. Even though the mediating effect of reflexivity in this theoretical model was expected, it could not be proven on a statically significant level (5\% confidence interval). However, additional statistical analysis indicates that this effect might be present if the study included a larger sample. In the conclusions, the academic and managerial contributions are highlighted, along with suggestions for future research directions.