Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies

By Mats Alvesson, Katja Einola. Leadership Quarterly, 2019

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study authentic leadership as a prominent but problematic example of positive leadership that we use as a more general “warning” against the current fashion of excessive positivity in leadership studies. Without trying to cover “everything”, we critically examine the principal tenets of mainstream authentic leadership theory and reveal a number of fundamental flaws: shaky philosophical and theoretical foundations, tautological reasoning, weak empirical studies, nonsensical measurement tools, unsupported knowledge claims and a generally simplistic and out of date view of corporate life. Even though our study focuses on authentic leadership, much of our criticism is also applicable to other popular positive leadership theories, such as transformational, servant, ethical and spiritual leadership. (Less)

Subfields: Demography, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1f3ef22194d775a3c27e68f699658acb9aeaee8

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Citations in the corpus

Leadership and work engagement: Exploring explanatory mechanisms (2020, background): “For example, some leadership research focuses on contextual elements of leadership, which avoids falling into the hero-myth trap (Alvesson and Einola, 2019; Yukl, 1999).”
A multilevel investigation of the link between ethical leadership behaviour and employees green behaviour in the hospitality industry (2021, background): “Although different other styles of leadership such as authentic leadership (Alvesson and Einola, 2019), transformational leadership (Hoch et al.”
Antecedents and outcomes of authentic leadership across culture: A meta-analytic review (2021, background): “For example, Alvesson and Einola (2019) has challenged the contribution of authentic leadership research by warning that authentic leadership represents an “excessive positivity fashion” in leadership studies.”