Authentic Leadership, Authentic Followership, Basic Need Satisfaction, and Work Role Performance

By H. Leroy, Frederick Anseel, W. Gardner, Luc Sels. 2015

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Authentic leadership occurs when individuals enact their true selves in their role as a leader. This article examines the role of authentic followership in the previously established relationship between authentic leadership and follower in-role and extrarole performance behaviors. Consideration of followers who enact their true selves is important to understand how authentic leadership fosters follower self-determined work motivation and thus work role performance. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as a guiding framework, the authors propose that authentic leadership, authentic followership, and their interplay are positively related to the satisfaction of followers’ basic needs, which, in turn, are positively related to follower work role performance. The authors conducted a survey study of 30 leaders and 252 followers in 25 Belgian service companies. The results provide evidence of positive relationship for both authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower basic need satisfaction in a cross-level model where authentic leadership was aggregated to the group level of analysis. Cross-level interaction results indicated that authentic leadership strengthened the relationship between authentic followership and follower basic need satisfaction. Follower basic need satisfaction was shown to mediate the relationship of authentic leadership and authentic followership with follower work role performance. A test of mediated moderation further demonstrated that basic need satisfaction mediates the interaction of authentic leadership and authentic followership on follower work role performance. The implications for leadership research and practice are explored.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4efa2bb5ba1f11067587b230d1c6297083a05cb2

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Leader perceptions and motivation as outcomes of followership role orientation and behavior (2018, background): “While attempts are being made to rectify this problem (Collinson, 2006; Dasborough et al., 2009; Howell and Shamir, 2005; Kark and Van Dijk, 2007; Leroy et al., 2015; Sy, 2010), empirical investigation of followership—the nature and impact of followers and following in the leadership process (Uhl-Bi”
Self-Determination Theory Can Help You Generate Performance and Well-Being in the Workplace: A Review of the Literature (2018, background): “…means being honest with oneself and about one’s own strengths and weaknesses, displaying sincerity with others and behaving in a way that reflects personal values, leaders and managers who engender these behaviors make it more likely for employees to attain need satisfaction (Leroy et al., 2015).”
An Investigation of Authentic Leadership’s Individual and Group Influences on Follower Responses (2018, background): “Moreover, with only one exception (Leroy et al., 2015), group-level considerations are not even mentioned in these articles until the Methods section, at which time the authors explain that aggregation was used either to accommodate a hierarchically nested data structure or to correct for…”
The Relationship between Job Satisfaction, Work-Life Balance and Organizational Commitment on Employee Performance (2018, background): “This view is supported by Leroy et al. (2015) that also clarified the positive toward their job and higher motivation, the higher performance will have.”
Out of the Box? How Managing a Subordinate’s Multiple Identities Affects the Quality of a Manager-Subordinate Relationship (2015, unknown): “Specifically, the LMX and leadership literatures are beginning to examine managers’ and subordinates’ identities as key variables in managersubordinate relationships (e.g., Chang & Johnson, 2010; Jackson & Johnson, 2012; Leroy et al., 2012).”