In a globalised and accelerated economy, managers are under increasing pressure to reconcile organisational goals that are independent from human being with the reality of human relationships. The human being, as a being with intellect and senses striving towards happiness, is the focus of positive leadership styles and is their major concern in the field of management theory. In this article, three such positive styles, authentic, servant and ethical leadership principles and their operating conditions are compared using international literature. The literature time span of about two decades shows that the evolution of the ethical leadership literature has slowed down, while the authentic and servant leadership literature has continued to evolve and is still evolving today. The comparative table that appears in this study highlights both commonalities and distinctions, in that, in addition to high moral and ethical standards, the authentic style focuses primarily on the person of the leader, the ethical leader on the ethical standards of the organisation, while the servant leader focuses on the development of the well-being of the subordinate, the other person, even through self-sacrifice. We intend to use the results of this research to investigate measures of positive styles, preparing the scientific ground for future primary empirical field studies.
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