Authentic leadership is an approach that is popular with both academic researchers and practicing managers. It is a frequent topic of discussion in academic journals and in practitioner publications. Despite the attention, there are few studies that provide experimental tests of authentic leadership that might inform how to develop it in people who supervise others. Just last week our research team at Tampa General Hospital published a paper (free to download via open-access), in the peer-reviewed journal Human Performance that provides a test of authentic leadership theory with a training intervention. I was joined in this effort by David Howard, Eric Eisenberg, John Couris, and Joann Quinn. It represented a partnership between academic researchers and organizational practitioners that enabled us to conduct an experimental test of authentic leadership theory to see if we could train managers to be more authentic and if that would lead to expected outcomes in direct reports.
What Is Authentic Leadership?
Authentic leadership is based on the idea that leaders should be their authentic selves at work. This begins with leaders being self-aware of their own strengths, weaknesses and values. This enables leaders to express their “true selves” when interacting with followers. The academic literature talks about four qualities of authentic leaders that combined create authentic leadership. Authentic leaders
- Know themselves and how others view them.
- Maintain consistency between values and behavior.
- Are transparent with followers in sharing information.
- Are open to input from others and base decisions on information.
According the authentic leadership theory, being authentic helps develop trust in followers, and that leads to positive attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction) and motivation.
The AKTiVe Version of Authentic Leadership
Because we were creating an intervention designed to change leadership style, we designed our training around a set of a dozen specific behaviors that would reflect authenticity. We reviewed the authenticity literature, and chose the behaviors to fit into the following four qualities, based on John Couris’ doctoral dissertation.
- Authenticity is the consistency between words and actions.
- Kindness is showing appreciation and offering support.
- Transparency is sharing information and explaining the rationale for decisions.
- Vulnerability is admitting mistakes and apologizing when wrong.
We referred to this behavior-focused version of authentic leadership as the AKTiVe model of leadership.
A Test of Authentic Leadership Theory with a Training Intervention
We began by randomly assigning 40 managers to be trained immediately or in two months. We surveyed all direct-reports of the managers about their manager’s authentic leadership and their own trust of that manager, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We conducted a pre-test before the training began and four follow-up post-tests two months apart. The training was a 4-hour session that covered the nature of authentic leadership and the behaviors that should be incorporated. Accountability partners were assigned with whom the managers would meet every-other-week to help them stay on track. We also examined the annual engagement survey data for the organization both before and after all 40 managers went through the training. That survey asks employees questions about their relationship with their supervisors.
Conclusions from the Study
We analyzed the results from the four surveys as well as the annual engagement survey. There were three main conclusions. First, we found that authentic leadership can be trained. This was reflected in the annual engagement survey results and in the results of our post-tests. Second, it can be difficult for direct reports to notice behavior change in their managers. We found that only direct reports new to a manager indicated change in their manager’s leadership. Third, changing authentic leadership led to an increase in trust in the manager, but not job satisfaction or organizational commitment. This runs counter to what authentic leadership theory predicts and academic research has shown in the past. Clearly, we need more experimental research so help us understand the disconnect between our results and other studies. For example, was the time frame too short, or are job attitudes driven by other things?
Our study is a test of authentic leadership theory with a training intervention, something that is rarely found in an academic journal, and not just for authentic leadership. Intervention studies in most areas of industrial-organizational psychology and management are rare. This is unfortunate because we need experimental research to provide tests of theories and give insights about how best to design interventions that will be effective.
Image generated by DALL-E 4.0. Prompt “image of a supervisor explaining the reason for something to subordinates.”
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