Authenticity in leading: Asset or liability?

• Autor(a) principal: Gandarez, Cláudia Sofia Noronha Pinto
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/27077
• topic: Authentic leadership; Organizational political crisis; Crisis preparedness; Political savvy; Liderança autêntica; Crise política organizacional; Preparação para a crise; Sabedoria política

Following the emergence of the ethical dimension in business, leadership studies have been proposing several types of ethically-focused leaders, among which authentic leadership. This has been mostly advocated as being beneficial to organizations and employees, but there are also suggestions in the literature that it can be detrimental as authenticity may be occasionally counterproductive, as inferred by the organizational politics literature. This suggests that the relationship between authentic leadership and organizational outcomes may not follow a linear relation contrarily to what is usually assumed. This study is designed to test an inverted U-shaped relationship between authentic leadership and preparedness to deal with a political crisis in organizations. We tested the proposed curvilinear model with a sample of 127 employees to find a surprising U-shape relation, suggesting authenticity in leaders can be both an asset (when low or high) and a liability (when moderate). Findings are discussed in light of the literature.