Authentic Leadership

What authentic leadership is

Authentic Leadership (القيادة الأصيلة) is a theory that describes a leader who knows themselves, acts on values they have adopted, tells the people they work with what they really think, and weighs information that contradicts their view before deciding. This is our wording of what the name means and of the dimensions that the abstract of the measurement article, listed in the sources section, mentions. It is not a literal definition from a reference, and we do not claim that a single agreed definition exists.

The theoretical formulation of the concept is attributed to Luthans and Avolio, in a chapter published in 2003, and an instrument to measure it was then produced in an article by Walumbwa and colleagues in 2008. It is a theoretical description of a style of leadership and is not a verdict on any particular manager. What follows introduces the theory and its limits. It is not a report that the theory improves performance or commitment, and it is not a report that the theory fails to improve them.

The sources we checked

We verified the bibliographic data of the works below in Crossref, except for the first chapter, which we took from the publisher’s table of contents because Crossref does not register it. That establishes that the works exist and does not establish what they contain:

• Luthans and Avolio. The chapter “Authentic Leadership Development” in the book “Positive Organizational Scholarship”, published in 2003. The chapter appears in the book’s table of contents at the publisher, and we did not verify its final page number.
• Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson. An article whose main title is “Authentic Leadership” and whose subtitle concerns the development of a measure grounded in theory and its validation (“Development and Validation”), in the Journal of Management, volume 34, issue 1, 2008, pages 89 to 126, published online on 26 October 2007, with the identifier 10.1177/0149206307308913.
• Gardner, Cogliser, Davis and Dickens. The article “Authentic leadership: A review of the literature and research agenda” in The Leadership Quarterly, volume 22, issue 6, December 2011, pages 1120 to 1145.
• Banks, McCauley, Gardner and Guler. An article in The Leadership Quarterly, volume 27, issue 4, August 2016, pages 634 to 652, whose title contains the phrase “A test for redundancy”.
• Alvesson and Einola. The article “Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies” in The Leadership Quarterly, volume 30, issue 4, August 2019, pages 383 to 395.
• Gardner, Karam, Alvesson and Einola. The article “Authentic leadership theory: The case for and against” in The Leadership Quarterly, volume 32, issue 6, December 2021, article number 101495.

We saw the abstract of the 2008 article as it appears in its records in Crossref and OpenAlex, and the abstracts of the 2011 and 2019 articles as university pages and research repositories gave them in search results. We did not see the text of any of the six works. What we say about the 2016 and 2021 articles is inferred from their titles alone. Attributing the theoretical formulation of the concept to the 2003 chapter is a common attribution in the literature, and we did not verify it from the chapter’s text.

The abstract of the 2008 article states that the researchers tested the instrument in five samples from China, Kenya and the United States, and that confirmatory factor analysis supported a higher order multidimensional model with four dimensions. It adds that the instrument correlated positively with performance rated by the supervisor, and that it predicted attitudes and behaviours at work beyond what ethical and transformational leadership accounted for. From the abstract we do not know the sample sizes, the strength of the correlation, or who answers the items of the instrument, so we limit ourselves to relaying what it says.

The abstract of the 2011 review, as the repositories relay it, states that the review traces the historical development of the definition of the concept and analyses 91 publications by type, authors, theoretical foundations, methods and samples. We do not present its conclusions, because we did not see them.

The four dimensions

The four dimensions are those named in the abstract of the 2008 article. The explanation of each name below follows its plain wording and is not quoted from the researchers:

• Self Awareness. The leader knows their strengths, their limits and their effect on others.
• Relational Transparency. The leader presents themselves to the people they work with as they are, stating what they think to the extent that suits the work context.
• Internalized Moral Perspective. The leader guides their behaviour by standards that come from their own values, and not from the pressure of the group or the organisation alone.
• Balanced Processing. The leader weighs the information available, including what contradicts their own opinion, before deciding.

The abstract describes the model as a multidimensional model of a higher order, meaning that the four dimensions are counted under one concept.

How the dimensions can be observed in daily work

The questions below are ours, put together to make the meaning easier to grasp. They are not the items of the instrument and not a list taken from a reference, and one answer to one of them is not enough to describe a leader:

• Self Awareness. Does the leader ask the team about the effect of a decision on them, and admit what the leader does not do well?
• Relational Transparency. Does the leader explain the reasons for a decision to the team, even when the reason is not comfortable for the leader?
• Internalized Moral Perspective. When no one is watching, does the leader’s conduct match what the leader announces in meetings?
• Balanced Processing. Does the leader ask for the opinion of those who disagree before settling a matter, and change a decision when information appears that contradicts what the leader had assumed?

The answers are read across several situations and not in one, because a leader can act out of character in a single situation under pressure of time or because of the sensitivity of the subject.

How it differs from nearby concepts

• Transformational style. Raising followers’ ambition and their sense of meaning in their work is the subject of transformational leadership. Its focus is what the leader does to the motivation of followers, whereas the focus of authentic leadership is the leader’s consistency with themselves and with their values. That entry counts idealised influence, meaning the leader’s commitment to what the leader asks of others, as one of its four components. The title of the 2016 article by Banks and colleagues indicates that they tested whether one of the two concepts is redundant with the other, and we do not know the result.
• Servant approach. A philosophy that starts from the needs and growth of followers is set out in servant leadership. Its starting point is the need of the team, and the starting point of authentic leadership is the leader’s relation to themselves, so one manager can be described by both concepts together.
• Emotional skill. The ability to recognise feelings and to understand their effect on behaviour, whose first component in one model is self awareness, is explained under emotional intelligence. The name of the first dimension in the instrument of Walumbwa and colleagues resembles the name of that component, and we do not know that the two meanings coincide, so we treat them as separate concepts.

The leadership styles page in the Arabic glossary states that a style is a description of a way of working and not of the character of the person who uses it, and that one manager can show more than one style. In our view the word “authentic” invites a judgement on a leader’s character, and describing the four dimensions through behaviour that can be observed, without an overall judgement on the person, is the more useful course.

What is criticised in the theory

The abstract of the 2019 article by Alvesson and Einola states that they took authentic leadership as a case for a wider criticism of positive leadership research, and that their criticism includes weak philosophical foundations, tautological reasoning, thin empirical work, and measurement tools that the abstract calls nonsensical. We relay that from the abstract as university pages relay it. We do not judge whether the criticism is correct, and we do not know the detailed arguments of the authors.

The title of the 2021 article indicates that arguments for the theory and against it are gathered in one article, and among its four authors are Alvesson and Einola, who wrote the 2019 article. We do not know what it concluded.

The name itself raises a question, which is our own: is it enough for a leader to be consistent with their values if those values are disputed in the leader’s organisation? Consistency alone does not tell us whether the values are agreed, and we do not know how the works we did not see answer it.

A hypothetical worked example: a gap between a leader’s self rating and the team’s rating

Suppose a leader rates themselves on the four dimensions on a scale from 1 to 5, and five members of the team rate the leader on the same dimensions. The self ratings are 4.5 for Self Awareness, 4.0 for Relational Transparency, 4.5 for Internalized Moral Perspective and 4.0 for Balanced Processing. Their average is (4.5 + 4.0 + 4.5 + 4.0) ÷ 4 = 17.0 ÷ 4 = 4.25.

The five team ratings are these. On Self Awareness: 4, 3, 4, 3 and 4, a total of 18 and an average of 18 ÷ 5 = 3.6. On Relational Transparency: 3, 3, 2, 3 and 4, a total of 15 and an average of 3.0. On Internalized Moral Perspective: 5, 4, 4, 5 and 4, a total of 22 and an average of 4.4. On Balanced Processing: 3, 4, 3, 3 and 2, a total of 15 and an average of 3.0.

The gaps between the self rating and the team rating are 4.5 minus 3.6 = 0.9 for Self Awareness, 4.0 minus 3.0 = 1.0 for Relational Transparency, 4.5 minus 4.4 = 0.1 for Internalized Moral Perspective and 4.0 minus 3.0 = 1.0 for Balanced Processing. The gaps total 3.0, with an average of 3.0 ÷ 4 = 0.75. That is the same difference as between 4.25 and the average of the team ratings, (3.6 + 3.0 + 4.4 + 3.0) ÷ 4 = 14.0 ÷ 4 = 3.5.

Because the team is only five people, one member who raises the rating on Self Awareness from 3 to 5 is enough to bring the total to 20 and the average to 4.0. That moves the gap from 0.9 to 0.5, a change of 0.4, which is 2 ÷ 5, caused by one person.

All the figures are hypothetical and were set to show the method of calculation. They do not represent an organisation or a study, and the scale is not the instrument of Walumbwa and colleagues, whose items we do not know. The example does not say who is right about the gap, the leader or the team, and the gap may reflect a difference in what each side sees.

The page on 360 degree appraisal states that a small number of raters in a category lets the employee infer who wrote each comment, and it gives no minimum number. In our view five raters is a number small enough for this inference to be plausible, so the example is best read as an arithmetic exercise and not as a model for collecting opinions.

The role of human resources

Human resources can take the four dimensions as questions for a development conversation with a manager, and can put them on the agenda of a leadership development programme if the organisation chooses. The administrative decision about a manager stays with whoever holds it in the organisation. In our judgement a decision on promotion or pay should not be built on describing a manager as authentic, because the theory is under criticism and because we have not seen the items of its instrument.

A team’s candour with its leader may depend on the safety the team feels. The glossary entry on psychological safety defines it as an employee’s belief that they can ask a question, admit a mistake or disagree with their manager’s view without that counting against them. It is an estimate of ours that the transparency of a leader alone is not enough for a team to speak frankly if this belief is absent, and we attribute that estimate to no source.

The limits of the concept

• A concept under criticism. The 2019 article, as its abstract gives it, criticises the foundations and the instruments of the theory, and the 2021 article gathers arguments for it and against it, judging by its title.
• An instrument whose items we have not seen. We did not see the items of the instrument or its reliability, so we adopt from it no score and no threshold.
• A Saudi context not examined. We know of no Saudi study that we adopt on applying or measuring the concept in Saudi organisations.
• A description that leans toward judging the person. The word “authentic” carries an implied compliment, and in our reading a description in terms of observable behaviour is more precise than a description in terms of a trait.

How the term is misused

• Taken as praise. Every manager who says what they think is called authentic, even when the manager does not weigh what contradicts their opinion.
• Credited with an effect without a source. For example, saying that it raises trust or performance without a figure from a named source.
• Used to silence criticism. An opposing view is dismissed because its holder is not “authentic” in someone’s judgement.

What the evidence allows us to say

We do not state that authentic leadership raises performance, commitment or trust, and we do not state that it fails to raise them. All we have are abstracts, titles and publication data, we did not see the text of any of the six works, and we found no Saudi study that we adopt. We attribute no effect or figure to any source other than what we relayed from the abstract of the 2008 article.

Our suggestion is to treat the term as a theoretical description of four dimensions, each of which is examined against the facts of each organisation: what the leader does and in which situation, what the team sees, and what changes afterwards. What is decided after that depends on the nature of the work, the leader and the team.