Authentic Leadership in the Job Demands and Resources Perspective:A Multilevel Investigation

Abstract

The authentic leadership model posits that authentic leaders can foster their followers’ personal development to produce better job outcomes. The current study adopted the Job Demands and Resources Model (JD-R model, Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) to examine how authentic leadership can enrich employees’ resource reservoir (i.e., job resources and personal resources), to combat against job stressors (i.e., emotional and cognitive demands), and consequently lead them to an optimal psychological state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi,1990; Bakker, 2005, 2008) for better job outcomes (i.e., in- role performance and organizational citizenship behavior). Our analyses of data from 869 employees nested in 68 teams supported the majority of our hypotheses, after taking into account the positive influence of transformational leadership. This study expands the authentic leadership model by showing that authentic leadership can enhance employee job outcomes not only through increased personal resources, but also through increased job resources in the supportive, developmental work environment. In addition, future research on authentic leadership should consider whether its effects on employee job outcomes are bounded by job demands. This study is also among very first to respond to Schaufeli (2015) and Bakker and Demerouti’s (2016) call to investigate leadership as an independent factor in the JD-R framework (Bakker & Demerouti, 2016). Practical implications are discussed at the end of the paper.