Authentic leadership: making meaning and building engagement

Abstract

PurposeToday’s organizations continue to suffer from the detrimental effects of employee disengagement. Leaders and their behavior play a significant role in limiting these negative effects. The literature provides evidence that facets of the full-range leadership model impact employee engagement. This paper aims to extend the leader-engagement connection to include the role authentic leadership plays in cultivating meaningfulness and engagement.Design/methodology/approachThis research uses a quantitative survey of 90 working professionals to test a mediated model and its hypothesized relationships among authentic leadership, meaningfulness and employee engagement. Hypotheses were tested with ordinary least squares regression in the PROCESS macro for Statistical Packages for the Social Science.FindingsThe results confirmed the positive impact of authentic leadership on engagement. The indirect effect of authentic leadership on engagement through meaningfulness was not found to be significant. However, post hoc analysis found evidence that the impact of authentic leadership is mediated by the dimensional aspect of meaningfulness, positive meaning.Originality/valueThese findings extend the empirical evidence tying leadership behavior to employee engagement by clarifying how authentic leadership influences employees to participate more fully in their organization’s activities. Further, this research provides alternative pathways for leaders to encourage and elicit engagement from their followers.