A reconceptualization of authentic leadership: Leader legitimation via follower-centered assessment of the moral dimension

By Yusuf M. Sidani, W. Rowe. Leadership Quarterly, 2018

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We explore some challenges that face authentic leadership scholarship including problems related to how the construct is understood and measured. We present a model of authentic leadership that looks at it, not as a leadership style, but as an outcome of a legitimation process. Authentic leadership represents legitimated follower perceptions of a leader's authenticity which are activated by moral judgments. We explain how a follower-centered assessment of the moral component helps explain leadership dynamics in situations involving ethical relativism, thus alleviating concerns regarding the presumed moral component of the construct. The overlap between leaders' and followers' value systems leads to impressions of authenticity, even in cases in which there are no clear universal moral standards. An authentic person's behavior cannot be labeled as “leadership” unless it is embraced by a follower who grants moral legitimacy to the leader. We then discuss the implications of our study for scholars and practitioners.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fcfe68c1d8473ca3a3c1ce4dab785bf80e3fe96

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems and Management

1. Anne Burmeister
2. Ulrike Fasbender
3. Katja Einola
4. Fabiola H. Gerpott
5. Alex J. Bowers
6. Mats Alvesson

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Anne Burmeister
2. Ulrike Fasbender
3. Katja Einola
4. Yaqing Mao
5. Sen Zhang
6. Fabiola H. Gerpott
7. Alex J. Bowers
8. Mats Alvesson

Citations in the corpus

• Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies (2019, methodology): “Some advocates of authentic leadership leave morality out of the picture (Sidani & Rowe, 2018), whereas others define AL as a moral approach to leadership (Lemoine et al., 2019).”
• Respectful leadership and followers’ knowledge sharing: A social mindfulness lens (2020, background): “…recent calls to avoid construct ambiguity by studying clearly defined, unidimensional aspects of leadership as drivers of employee behavior (Sidani and Rowe, 2018; Van Knippenberg and Sitkin, 2013) and advances the knowledge sharing literature that has started to examine the influence of…”
• Authentic leadership and teachers’ voice behaviour: The mediating role of psychological empowerment and moderating role of interpersonal trust (2020, background): “Sidani and Rowe (2018) argued that authentic leadership development should be coupled with follower development.”