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Abstract
Whilst the academic literature on leadership has identified authenticity as an important leadership attribute, few studies have examined how authentic leadership is evaluated in naturally occurring discourse. This article explores how authentic leadership was characterised and evaluated in the discourse of the British press during the 2015 Labour Party leadership election—won, against the odds, by veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. Using membership categorisation analysis, we show that the media discourse about authentic leadership was both ambiguous and ambivalent. In their representation of authentic leadership, we found that a discourse of ‘ethical’ leadership was played out in tension with a discourse of ‘effective’ leadership. We propose that this complex and contradictory discursive landscape is also relevant in business contexts where ‘ethical’ leaders are subjected to praise for their virtues but also criticism for their ineffectiveness. Future research could usefully study how ‘ethical’ leaders in different settings can be subject to competing evaluations when their ethical values are discursively contrasted to expectations concerning what it takes to be an ‘effective’ leader.
Highlights
While the ethics of leadership has a long history, the more recent emergence of a body of literature on authentic leadership has represented a turning point in the discussion of ethics in contemporary leadership studies
This study explores an interesting puzzle drawn from the British press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour MP, during the 4-month Labour
The research question addressed in this article is: how was Jeremy Corbyn constructed and evaluated as an authentic leader in the press? Building on previous membership categorisation analysis work on media materials (Eglin and Hester 1999; Stokoe and Attenborough 2015) and in organizational settings (Fairhurst 2007: Chapter 3), our analysis shows the ambiguity and ambivalence evident in how authentic leadership was discursively constructed in the media
Summary
While the ethics of leadership has a long history, the more recent emergence of a body of literature on authentic leadership has represented a turning point in the discussion of ethics in contemporary leadership studies. Within the construct’s positive psychology roots, authentic leaders are thought to have a clear sense of their ethical values and a “moral compass” (Ford and Harding 2011: 465) that leads them to act transparently and enact their values in their leadership behaviour (Luthans and Avolio 2003). Authentic leaders are understood to know ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ and remain steadfastly ‘true to themselves’ when putting these values into practice. Set against this scholarship, this study explores an interesting puzzle drawn from the British press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour MP, during the 4-month Labour
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