Digital transformation is one of the defining challenges of our time. For many established firms, the difficulty lies not only in acquiring new digital technologies—such as artificial intelligence (AI), automation, analytics, and digital platform solutions—but in learning to see the opportunities and threats that digital change brings. Leaders face the question: how can they focus attention on what truly matters when the signals of disruption are noisy, ambiguous, and urgent?
In our recent article published in the Journal of Management Studies, we explore this question by investigating how CEO humility interacts with situational urgency to shape firms’ digital investment behavior—specifically, their corporate venture capital (CVC) activities in digital ventures. We argue that a humble CEO—someone who is self-aware, appreciative of others’ contributions, and open to learning—can create the attentional conditions for renewal, particularly when the organization faces urgent pressures to adapt.
- What We Studied
Our study examined 362 CEOs from 191 established firms across 35 industries, drawing on multiple data sources to measure key variables such as CEO humility, top management team composition, industry context, and CVC activity. We conceptualized CEO humility as an observable leadership trait encompassing openness to feedback, appreciation of others, and a realistic self-view.
We then assessed how CEO humility interacts with situational urgency, captured through two lenses:
- Internal urgency, reflected in a lack of digital experience within the top management team and a high business model dependence on information and knowledge
- External urgency, reflected in the degree of emerging digital competition in the firm’s industry.
Our outcome variable was the number of digital CVC investments the firm made in the following year. In essence, we asked: Do humble CEOs respond more decisively to digital urgency? And if so, under what conditions?
- What We Found
Our findings reveal a clear pattern. CEO humility is positively associated with the number of digital CVC investments a firm undertakes. Humble CEOs are more attentive to emerging opportunities and more willing to engage with new ideas originating from outside the firm.
This effect, however, depends on context. When internal or external urgency is high, the relationship between humility and CVC investments becomes significantly stronger. Concretely, when top management teams lack digital experience, humble CEOs appear better able to recognize the resulting capability gap and to act upon it. They do not react defensively to their top management team’s limitations. Instead, they seek learning opportunities through external ventures. Likewise, when industries face emerging digital competition through a higher number of VC-backed digital ventures entering the field, humble CEOs appear more responsive in deploying CVC to foster equity-based partnerships with ventures in the digital sphere. These findings suggest that humility is most valuable when circumstances demand quick and adaptive responses. Interestingly, we also examined whether the firm’s dependence on information and knowledge as part of its business model affected this dynamic. However, we found no consistent evidence for such moderation. This suggests that humility’s attentional benefits operate across different types of firms, not only those already steeped in digital knowledge.
- Why This Matters
Our results challenge a persistent stereotype in leadership thinking, namely that the initiation of change requires bold, overconfident and assertive CEOs. While such traits can help mobilize organizations, they can also blind leaders to early warning signals or external insights, such as the lack of internal capabilities and emerging competition. Humility, by contrast, opens space for curiosity, dialogue, and adaptive learning. Humble leaders tend to distribute attention more effectively across organizational interfaces. They listen to their teams, engage with external partners, and integrate diverse perspectives into strategic choices. This attentional openness becomes especially valuable in contexts of uncertainty, where no single actor holds all the relevant knowledge.
Moreover, humility seems to temper the (psychological) defensiveness that often inhibits firms from responding to digital transformation urgency. When CEOs acknowledge limits to their own expertise, they are more willing to explore unfamiliar terrain through CVC investments, and particularly digital ventures that may not promise immediate returns but build long-term strategic capability. This willingness roots in the underlying psychological orientations of humble CEOs, which include an ability and readiness to recognize gaps in their firm’s capabilities, an openness to continuous learning, and an appreciation of external expertise. These predispositions make CEOs more willing to accept short-term uncertainty and trade-off short-term performance for longer-term capability development through CVC investments.
Implications for Research and Practice
Our study bridges the literatures on the attention-based view and strategic leadership interfaces by highlighting how individual leader traits shape attention allocation within multi-level systems of interaction. The notion of situated attention encourages scholars to consider not only who the leader is, but also where they are situated—in terms of interfaces and urgency contexts. Based on our study, future research could explore other personal attributes—such as different types of personal values or leadership styles—that might shape how leaders allocate attention under different forms of urgency. Another promising direction is to examine how humility influences attention distribution over time: does it help leaders sustain focus once the acute sense of urgency fades? Additionally, different types of urgency—such as regulatory, societal, or environmental—could interact with humility in unique ways. As organizations face sustainability and ethical transformations alongside digital ones, understanding how leaders attend to multiple, overlapping urgencies will become increasingly vital.
For practitioners, the implications are equally important:
- Boards and shareholders might reassess how they evaluate leadership potential. Rather than focusing exclusively on charisma or assertiveness, they might value attentional qualities such as humility, curiosity, and openness to others’ input.
- Executives and leadership coaches can foster humility as a disciplined awareness—recognizing one’s limits, seeking expertise, and creating conditions where attention flows across boundaries.
- CVC units might reflect on how leadership attention supports their mandate. Even the most capable CVC teams depend on top-level attentional endorsement, and a humble CEO can legitimize experimentation and learning.
Concluding Thoughts
Our study offers a simple but powerful message: humility can be a source of strategic strength.
In fast-changing digital and AI transformation landscapes, firms need leaders who are not only bold but attentive—leaders who listen, learn, and engage across boundaries. Humble CEOs, by orienting their attention toward others and toward emerging signals, can convert urgency into action.
