How Authentic Leadership Enhances Group Outcomes: The Role of Team Reflexivity

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of teams in organizations and recent calls to investigate the effects of authentic leadership that look beyond the individual level of analysis, the mechanisms through which authentic leaders influence group processes and outcomes remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we adopt the perspective of self-regulation theory to examine the role that authentic leaders have in developing the specific team regulatory process of reflexivity. Given that the four defining dimensions of authentic leadership are self-regulatory in nature, we hypothesize that authentic leadership will be associated with team performance via the mediating mechanism of team reflexivity. Using survey data from 53 teams in three organizations in the United Kingdom and Greece, results indicated a significant, fully mediated relationship between authentic leadership and team reflexivity, which in turn predicted team effectiveness and productivity. These results constitute a first step towards a clearer understanding of how authentic leaders may influence not only interpersonal processes, as established in previous studies, but also task-related team processes, particularly during phases of transition, in order to leverage team performance outcomes. Our findings thus afford leaders with alternative practical strategies for fostering team performance that are underpinned by the practice of reflexivity. A number of avenues for further research are identified which build upon the findings of the present study.