Abstract
The clamour for leaders to be authentic in enacting their roles is now widely heard in both the academic literature and popular media. Yet, the authentic leadership (AL) construct remains deeply problematic and arguably impossible to enact. Using the performance of emotional labour (EL) as a lens to view relational transparency, a core component of AL, our research surfaces the paradoxes inherent in this construct and their implications for practicing leaders. Our data reveal something of the mystery surrounding how practicing leaders are able to feel authentic even as they manage their emotions as a routine tool of accomplishing their leadership role. This apparent disconnect between the experiencing of authenticity and the actions/interactions in which this experience is embedded raises profound questions concerning authenticity as a phenomenon, how it is discursively constructed, its relationship to inauthenticity – especially in the practice of leadership – and even its relevance. Drawing on these concerns, we suggest an agenda for future research in relation to authenticity in leadership and highlight the value of EL as a challenging ‘test context’ for honing our understanding of what ‘authenticity’ might mean.
Highlights
The call for leaders to be authentic in the daily enactment of their role is a frequent one, both in the academic literature (Avolio and Gardner, 2005) and in the media (Elliott and Stead, 2018)
What emerged for us was the potential of these rationales to detach the experience of personal authenticity from the actions and interactions performed such as to construct a plausible relationship between emotional labour and authentic leadership (AL)
The paradoxes emerging from our data have implications for our understanding of authenticity as a phenomenon and raise profound questions for the AL construct
Summary
The call for leaders to be authentic in the daily enactment of their role is a frequent one, both in the academic literature (Avolio and Gardner, 2005) and in the media (Elliott and Stead, 2018). The AL construct was developed from an explicitly normative and functionalist perspective (Avolio and Gardner, 2005; Avolio et al, 2004), with the expressed aim of delineating a style of leadership capable of producing measurable organisational outcomes (Avolio et al, 2004; Gardner and Schermerhorn, 2004), through leaders who are said to be ‘transparent about their intentions and [who] strive to maintain a seamless link between espoused values, behaviours and actions’ (Luthans and Avolio, 2003: 242) While this notion of ‘relational transparency’ as a core component of AL has not been without its critics (Kempster et al, 2019), the four-component Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) psychometric (Walumbwa et al, 2008) of which it is a part is widely accepted and applied. Critiques of AL that rest upon interaction and the ‘intersubjective, embodied relationships’ (Gardiner, 2013: 66) as truer reflections of authenticity than self-awareness and our ‘inner life’ have failed to receive the attention they deserve in shifting the focus of AL scholarship
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