Why Curious Leaders Build Better Teams.
Introduction
Curiosity in leadership is not a personality quirk. It is a measurable driver of psychological safety, innovation, and team performance, and most organizations have never treated it as a skill worth building deliberately.
Ask most leaders to describe their strongest qualities and curiosity rarely makes the list. Decisiveness does. Vision does. The ability to stay calm under pressure does. Curiosity sounds like something for scientists, artists, or small children, admirable in its own way but not obviously connected to the hard work of running a team, hitting a target, or making a difficult call under time pressure.
The research on what actually drives psychological safety, innovation, and team performance tells a considerably different story. Curiosity in leadership has been consistently overlooked in organizational research, not because it does not matter, but because almost nobody has thought to study it directly. The handful of researchers who have looked closely at what happens when leaders display genuine curiosity have found something significant enough that it deserves far more attention than it currently gets.
The overlooked variable
Organizational research on curiosity has focused almost entirely on the curiosity of employees, whether people lower in an organization ask questions, explore new approaches, and stay open to unfamiliar ideas. The curiosity of the leader themselves has been almost entirely absent from the conversation. A 2025 study published in Cogent Business and Management set out to correct that gap directly, examining how a leader's own displayed curiosity affects the people they lead.
The findings were substantial. Leadership display of curiosity had a significant impact on employees' creative performance, on their psychological capital, and on the broader psychological safety climate of the organization. The researchers were direct about the implication: organizations should develop curiosity among their leaders and treat it as a resource, not simply a personality trait some leaders happen to have and others do not.
That framing matters. A resource is something you build deliberately. A trait is something you either have or accept you lack. The research is suggesting the former, and the mechanism behind why curiosity produces these effects is worth understanding in detail.
What happens when a leader visibly does not know something
A separate and detailed study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examined a specific behavior: what happens when a leader visibly displays curiosity in front of their team, asking genuine questions, showing interest in an idea they did not generate themselves, admitting they do not already know the answer. The researchers found that this behavior significantly increased followers' sense of psychological safety, which in turn increased how often those followers spoke up with their own ideas and concerns.
The mechanism is not complicated once it is named. When a leader asks a genuine question rather than delivering a pre-formed answer, they are modeling something the rest of the team absorbs quickly: that not knowing is an acceptable, even expected, part of how this group operates. Amy Edmondson, whose research established the foundational understanding of psychological safety, makes this connection directly. Every time people withhold their thoughts, they rob themselves and their colleagues of small moments of learning, which stifles innovation across the entire team. By modeling curiosity and asking genuine questions, leaders begin to draw out the ideas that spark that innovation in the first place.
This is why curiosity functions so differently from most leadership qualities that get more conventional praise. Decisiveness signals that the leader has the answer. Curiosity signals that the answer is still being built, together, and that everyone in the room has a legitimate role in building it. Those two signals produce fundamentally different team dynamics, and only one of them reliably produces the psychological safety that research consistently links to innovation and voice.
Why employee voice is the outcome that actually matters
The connection between leader curiosity and psychological safety would be interesting on its own, but the research goes further, tracing the effect through to something organizations can directly measure. Employee voice, the willingness to speak up with ideas, concerns, and observations, has been separately shown to drive higher unit-level performance. The chain runs from a specific, observable leadership behavior, displaying curiosity, through psychological safety, and into a concrete organizational outcome that shows up in performance data.
This matters because it moves curiosity out of the category of nice-to-have leadership warmth and into the category of a leadership behavior with a traceable line to results. A leader who asks better questions is not simply being pleasant to work for. They are actively constructing the conditions under which the people around them are willing to contribute the ideas, concerns, and observations that better decisions and better performance actually depend on.
The specific behaviors that build this deliberately
Research on curious leadership points toward a small number of concrete practices rather than an abstract disposition. The first is a specific shift in the questions a leader asks after something goes wrong. What are we missing produces a fundamentally different conversation than what went wrong, because the first question invites collaborative exploration while the second invites defensiveness and blame. Teams respond to the framing of the question as much as to the content of it.
The second is the willingness to admit not knowing something directly and without deflection. This is uncomfortable for many leaders because it feels like a small forfeiture of authority. The research on psychological safety consistently finds the opposite effect. A leader who says plainly that they do not have the answer and are genuinely curious what the team thinks builds more trust than a leader who manufactures certainty they do not actually have, because the admission signals that this is a genuinely safe environment for uncertainty rather than one where only confident answers are welcome.
The third is spotlighting the people who think deeply but speak less often. Curious leaders do not just ask more questions themselves. They notice who in the room has not yet been asked, and they extend genuine interest toward perspectives that would otherwise stay quiet. This single practice, deliberately inviting a specific person's view rather than waiting for volunteers, is one of the most direct ways curiosity translates from a leader's internal disposition into a team's actual behavior.
Why this matters more, not less, as authority increases
There is a version of leadership development that assumes curiosity becomes less relevant as a person's seniority increases, on the theory that senior leaders are supposed to have more answers, not more questions. The research points in the opposite direction. Liu and colleagues' 2023 study on CEO curiosity found that it meaningfully affects organizational innovation at the highest level, and Ma's 2023 research on supervisor curiosity found it directly fosters team-level innovation beneath them. Curiosity does not become less valuable as a leader's scope expands. If anything, the reach of its effect expands along with the leader's influence, because more people are watching and absorbing the behavior being modeled.
This is worth taking seriously precisely because the instinct many leaders have as they gain seniority runs the other way. The pressure to appear certain, decisive, and in command increases with every level of promotion, and that pressure can push genuinely curious people toward performing a certainty they do not actually feel. The research suggests that instinct, followed too far, quietly costs the organization exactly the psychological safety and innovation that curiosity would otherwise have produced.
What this means for how you lead
Building curiosity as a deliberate leadership practice does not require becoming a different kind of person. It requires the willingness to ask a genuine question instead of delivering a pre-formed answer, to admit uncertainty rather than manufacture confidence, and to notice who in the room has something to say that has not yet been invited out. None of that diminishes authority. The research suggests it does the opposite, building the specific kind of trust and psychological safety that produces better ideas, more honest information, and stronger performance across the whole team.
The leaders who understand this are not treating curiosity as a soft addition to their leadership style. They are treating it as one of the more direct and underused levers available for building the exact conditions every other leadership initiative is trying to create.
If you want your leaders to build the kind of curiosity that unlocks genuine psychological safety and innovation in their teams, Juan Bendana builds keynotes around the psychology of confident leadership and what it actually takes to create an environment where people are willing to bring their best thinking forward. His talks are built for leadership conferences, corporate events, and sales kick-offs where organizations are ready to develop the leadership behaviors that produce real innovation, not just the appearance of it.
The leader with the most answers is not always the one whose team performs best. Often, it is the one who asked the better question.