The commonalities and specificities of authentic leadership: an empirical study of how leaders and followers bestow authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand

Abstract

Authentic leadership has been proposed as the new leadership paradigm that can meet the demands of today’s organisations. The authentic leadership literature suggests that there are three critical aspects before authentic leadership will be bestowed: first the espoused values and actions of authentic leaders must be congruent, second, the expectation of the leaders and the followers must be congruent, and third, the leaders must behave with high moral integrity for the good of their subordinates, the organisation and the community. Since these features of authentic leadership involve subjective interpretation before authentic leadership is bestowed, it is likely that evaluations of it vary in different settings. Therefore, leaders’ and followers’ constructs of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand, and in public and private organisations, were documented and compared using the Q method. Thirty leaders and followers in each of the public and private organisations in Ghana and New Zealand sorted selected statements about authentic leadership. Three factors or types of authentic leadership were identified and named for each of the four settings yielding twelve different perceptions of authentic leadership. While these results suggested that authentic leadership was idiosyncratic, further analysis showed that some attributes of authentic leadership were common to the organisations, and some were common to the countries. Further, a meta-analysis of all the factors found that some attributes of authentic leadership were common in all settings. These findings confirmed the importance of authentic leadership as a concept and extended it by highlighting the importance of two authentic leadership characteristics, firmness and appreciation. In order to encourage and support authentic leadership, it is necessary to consider an ‘employee-centric’ approach in which followers’ viewpoints were given full recognition. Further, effective leadership training programmes needed to be tailored to specific organisations in specific contexts in order to achieve authentic leadership and, therefore, better achieve desirable outcomes for organisations.