Authentic Leadership Structural Validity: Higher Education Staff Notion on Authentic Leadership

Abstract

Contemporary leadership theory and practice describes authentic leadership (AL) in relation to self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and balance processing of information (Walumbwa et al., 2008). A total of 580 academic, management and professional staffs were asked to rate the AL behaviours of their administrative heads using the rater version of authentic leadership questionnaire (Walumbwa et al., 2008). The present paper examines, if there are distinction among the measures of AL, if the latentvariables correlate with each other and then confirm the factor structure. Findings from Principal component Analysis (PCA) revealed the presence of three dimensions of AL -self-awareness, internalized moral perspective and relational transparency. The result also provides evidence that supports discriminant and convergent validity. We also present finding from the confirmatory factor analyses (CFA’s) which supports the adequacy of AL. The CFA’s Goodness of Fit Indices results reached acceptable level for some tested models. Based on the prior findings and the current findings we concluded that Walumbwa’s AL scales is an appropriate tool for assessing AL at a general level, though the extent of replication across population will be influenced by sampling characterization as espoused in this study.