It is a compelling workplace story: humility has a healthy form that builds relationships and a darker form that leaves people open to exploitation. Add a recent Dutch study and a validated scale, and the claim sounds unusually precise.
There is a problem. I could not find a 2023 Dutch study that reported these findings. The closest match is a 2023 paper validating the Quiet Ego Scale in Spanish samples. It retained four components, not two forms of humility, and did not study employees being taken advantage of at work.
This is one study, not settled consensus. More importantly, the headline appears to combine results and unanswered questions from several different research programmes. Separating them leaves a less dramatic but more useful account of humility.
What the 2023 study actually did
The 2023 paper was written by María L. Vecina, Ilaria Buonomo and Paula Benevene and published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Its first study tested the Quiet Ego Scale with 238 people in Spain who had varying levels of involvement in volunteering, activism and other forms of prosocial participation. A second study involved 288 active volunteers, community leaders and activists.
The scale showed an acceptable fit in the Spanish samples. People with higher quiet-ego scores also reported more benefits from their social participation, and those perceived benefits were associated with a stronger intention to continue. The design was cross-sectional and correlational, so it could not show that a quiet ego caused those benefits.
None of this concerned Dutch employees, stronger private relationships or workplace exploitation. The paper did test perceived costs of prosocial participation, but quiet ego was not significantly related to those costs. That result is almost the reverse of a finding that one form of humility makes people easier to exploit.
The Quiet Ego Scale has four parts
The original Quiet Ego Scale paper, published online in 2014 by Heidi Wayment, Jack Bauer and Kateryna Sylaska, describes a 14-item measure with four components: detached awareness, inclusive identity, perspective taking and growth-mindedness.
The phrase can be misleading if “quiet” is taken to mean weak, silent or self-erasing. The researchers were explicit that they did not mean a squashed ego. Their construct tries to capture a balance between agency and concern for other people. In plain terms, it is meant to describe someone who can listen beyond their immediate self-interest without losing their own place in the conversation.
Humility is related to that idea, but it is not one of the four scale components. The 2023 Spanish validation confirmed the same four-part structure. It did not split humility into two traits.
Where the two forms of humility come from
The two-form distinction comes from a separate paper by Aaron Weidman, Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy. Their 2018 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reported five studies with a combined 1,479 participants.
Using words supplied by non-specialists and academic experts, factor analyses, self-reports and an experimental induction, the researchers identified what they called appreciative humility and self-abasing humility.
Appreciative humility tended to follow personal success. It involved recognising other people’s value and celebrating their contribution, and was associated with authentic pride and prestige-based status. Self-abasing humility tended to follow failure. It involved harsh negative self-evaluation, withdrawal and hiding from other people’s judgement, and was associated with shame, low self-esteem and submissiveness.
That is an important distinction. Giving colleagues credit while retaining an accurate view of your own contribution is different from deciding that your contribution barely counts. But the study did not label one trait a relationship builder and the other a cause of workplace exploitation. Those are later interpretations.
Relationship evidence belongs to another construct
There is evidence connecting some forms of humility with more constructive relationships, although the measures and outcomes matter.
A 2024 PLOS One paper, for example, examined intellectual humility, meaning an awareness that one’s beliefs may be wrong. In one study of 640 US higher-education participants and another involving 269 people working in local-government finance, higher intellectual-humility scores were associated with more constructive and less destructive responses to conflict with friends, family and colleagues.
That finding was based on self-reports and correlations. It did not show that humility created stronger relationships over time. It also measured intellectual humility, not appreciative humility and not the Quiet Ego Scale. Treating all three as interchangeable produces a cleaner story than the evidence allows.
The workplace disadvantage was not exploitation
A separate 2022 workplace study by Ai Ni Teoh and Livia Kriwangko surveyed 475 working adults. Participants recalled a colleague and rated that person’s humility and competence, along with likability and willingness to cooperate.
The results revealed a trade-off. Colleagues judged as humble but less competent were more likable than competent but less humble colleagues. Yet when participants considered professional cooperation, they preferred the competent but less humble colleague over the humble but less competent one.
This suggests that warmth cannot fully substitute for perceived ability when work has to be done. It does not show anyone being exploited. Being selected less often for cooperation is different from being burdened with extra work, denied credit, underpaid or otherwise taken advantage of.
The wording may have emerged from a question at the end of the 2024 intellectual-humility paper. Its authors asked whether highly intellectually humble people might be seen as deferential and taken advantage of during conflict. They presented it as a possibility for future research, not as a result they had observed.
The useful distinction is confidence versus self-erasure
Once the citations are put back in their proper places, the evidence does not give us a Dutch workplace rule. It gives us several narrower ideas.
The quiet ego is designed to balance self-interest with attention to others. Appreciative humility combines a grounded sense of one’s own success with recognition of other people’s contribution. Self-abasing humility is marked by negative self-evaluation and withdrawal. Intellectual humility is about recognising the fallibility of one’s beliefs. These concepts overlap, but they are not synonyms.
I think the everyday distinction is still worth keeping. There is a difference between saying, “I did good work, and other people made it possible,” and saying, “My work does not deserve to be noticed.” The first leaves room for accuracy, gratitude and shared credit. The second removes the self from the account.
What the research does not establish is that the second response makes an employee a target for exploitation. That possibility is plausible, but plausibility is not a result. Humility can make a person easier to work with without requiring them to disappear, surrender credit or accept unfair treatment. The original quiet-ego idea was built around precisely that balance.
