Friend or fiend? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of moral and relational orientation in authentic leadership

Kim Bradley-Cole

doi:10.1177/17427150211016163

Abstract

Authentic leadership has been developed with insufficient empirical challenge to its definitional components, and alternative conceptualizations have largely been ignored. The theory remains heavily criticized and its distinctiveness from other higher-purpose leadership theories remains in doubt, leading to a circular debate as to its usefulness in practice. In response to the call to return to the definitional drawing table, this article presents the findings of an interpretative phenomenological study that reimagines authentic leadership as a two-component moral and relational model that is closer to Heidegger’s notions of ‘being true’ and ‘care’. The study inductively explores how leaders themselves make sense of authenticity in practice, when it is enacted by their own leaders within the social exchange relationship. It richly describes how managers perceive and attribute authenticity to their leaders within the lived experience of contemporary work. The study also identifies that working for a leader who is perceived as authentic feels like a friendship and is beneficial to followers’ own psychological experience of work, facilitates their own authentic expression and is worthy of retention as a distinct leadership theory that explains how performance is enabled within proximal leader relationships.

Highlights

The etymology of the word authentic as to ‘know thyself’ in Greek philosophy and the Westernised preoccupation with its common application as a marker of the ‘genuineness’, ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ of an object have been widely explained (Grayson and Martinec, 2004: 287)
Rather than offering a refinement to theory based on yet another conceptualized set of assumptions, or further testing of existing hypotheses, I return to the drawing table (Gardner et al, 2021) and present an empirically formed definition of authentic leadership that is grounded in how its enactment is observed within the lived context of managerial relationships
Heidegger (1962) offers the word ‘Eigentlichkeit’ to describe authenticity in relation to a person’s being, or existence, which has been translated as meaning ‘real’ or ‘true’. He regards personal authenticity as the core of human existence (‘Dasein’) that itself can be understood ‘in terms of a possibility of itself’ (Heidegger, 1962: 33) ‘that reveals what it is to be human in a privileged way’ (Guignon, 2014: 8). This temporal aspect of past through to future is congruent with the humanistic perspective of authentic leadership offered by Ilies et al (2005) who posited that the journey to authenticity is an eudaemonic endeavour encompassing the fostering of positive social exchanges that underpin the creation of high-quality leader–follower relationships

Summary

Introduction

The etymology of the word authentic as to ‘know thyself’ in Greek philosophy and the Westernised preoccupation with its common application as a marker of the ‘genuineness’, ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ of an object have been widely explained (Grayson and Martinec, 2004: 287). There remains an absence of shared understanding when the word is heuristically applied to another person, or in the context of this article, to a leader. This definitional confusion has led to a critical dismissal of authentic leadership as a tautological and intrinsically flawed theory (see Algera and Lips-Wiersma, 2012; Ford and Harding, 2011; Lawler and Ashman, 2012), along with more recent calls for a conceptual repositioning based on more elaborative and relationally oriented methods of enquiry (Iszatt-White and Kempster, 2019; Kempster et al, 2018). If even Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa (Ladkin and Spiller, 2013) are unable to fully live up to the expectations of an authentic leader, what is the practical utility of the incumbent theory in everyday working lives? Perhaps attempts to evaluate the authenticity of famous or political leaders are, in themselves, contributing to the elusiveness of the meaning of authenticity in leadership, because such evaluations raise it beyond the grasp of the everyday and attach it to acts of heroism (Ciulla, 2013)

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Conclusion