Authentic leadership in a bureaucratic environment: A qualitative study

Abstract

Authenticity is a crucial component of leadership for developing moral and ethical leaders in the public sector. Despite that, authentic leadership has struggled to progress into a more advanced theory. Therefore, this study serves as a foundation for new developments in authentic leadership studies. The research is valuable because it investigates aspects of authenticity and leadership drawn from public sector leaders’ experiences. It employs a qualitative approach using in-depth interviews of 15 top executive leaders in Malaysian public administration. The interpretive study is underpinned by authentic leadership and self-determination theory, and content analysis is applied to understand the subjective interpretation of the interviews through the identification of specific themes and patterns of coding facilitated by the NVivo software. The participants describe authenticity in leadership as a combination of mindset and qualities, such as purposeful intention, spiritual connection and sustainable legacy. This study provides a new perspective on authenticity in leadership from the public sector context. A new important factor emerged from the study, namely, spiritual connection, which is unique to the Malaysian context. Another theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge is that the element of personal growth, which is connected to human motivation by addressing autonomy from the self-determination theory perspective, is important to describe authenticity. These elements suggest the third wave of the leadership model that is derived from the interpersonal process between leader and followers in a bureaucratic environment. These results may be used to develop a new instrument for examining the public leadership context – as a new leadership model or design development intervention for future leaders in the public sector.