Authentic leadership

Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader's legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation. Generally, authentic leaders are positive people with truthful self-concepts who promote openness. By building trust and generating enthusiastic support from their subordinates, authentic leaders are able to improve individual and team performance. This approach has been fully embraced by many leaders and leadership coaches who view authentic leadership as an alternative to leaders who emphasize profit and share price over people and ethics. Authentic leadership is a growing area of study in academic research on leadership which has recently grown from obscurity to the beginnings of a fully mature concept. Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader's legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation. Generally, authentic leaders are positive people with truthful self-concepts who promote openness. By building trust and generating enthusiastic support from their subordinates, authentic leaders are able to improve individual and team performance. This approach has been fully embraced by many leaders and leadership coaches who view authentic leadership as an alternative to leaders who emphasize profit and share price over people and ethics. Authentic leadership is a growing area of study in academic research on leadership which has recently grown from obscurity to the beginnings of a fully mature concept. Despite the popularity of the construct, many foundational papers on this topic have recently been retracted or called into question because of issues surrounding the reporting of data and the inability of the authors to produce their original data. Moreover, there have been some recent high-profile criticisms of the theoretical basis of the construct, which has been said to be build on '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weak empirical studies, nonsensical measurement tools, unsupported knowledge claims and a generally simplistic and out of date view of corporate life'. The concept of “authenticity” can trace its history back to ancient Greece. Ancient Greek philosophers stressed authenticity as an important state through an emphasis on being in control of one's own life and the ubiquitous admonition: “Know thyself”. Authentic leadership as we know it today evolved from the history of these terms. It originated in the 1960s as a means to describe how an organization reflects itself authentically through leadership. Some believed that an entire organization could act authentically like a single person through responsibility, reactions to uncertainty, and creativity. Others believed that authentic leadership is actually more about how the leaders define their own role within an organization. Recently, authentic leadership has garnered more attention among scholars and practitioners because of publications from Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George and other calls for research. The past decade has seen a surge in publications about authentic leadership, producing new models, definitions, and theories. The emphasis on conceptual development suggest that the concept is still in the initial stages of construct evolution, though as the scholarly research on the topic progresses, the types of publications produced appear to be shifting from mostly conceptual pieces to more and more empirically based articles. This shift may be indicative of a nascent emergence of the construct from an introduction and elaboration evolutionary stage to one marked by evaluation and augmentation.