Valuing Benevolence or Power? The Joint Effects of Authentic Leadership and Leaders’ Values

Abstract

While traditional leadership approaches place power at the core of leadership, authentic leadership scholars would argue that benevolence is in fact the value that is most central to effective leadership. To date, these conflicting arguments about leaders’ power and benevolence values have not been empirically tested. We examined whether authentic leaders with high benevolence values or high power values lead followers to perform more organizational citizenship behaviors. Based on the analysis of 478 employees working in teams under 72 leaders, we found that authentic leaders with prominent benevolence values were more likely to positively influence followers’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward coworkers, while authentic leaders with prominent power values were more likely to positively impact followers’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward organizations. Furthermore, these joint effects were differentially mediated by high quality team-member exchange relationships and high quality leader-member exchange relationships, respectively. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding the values of authentic leaders when we investigate their influence on followers.