Authentic Leadership and its Significance

Authentic leadership is related to situational cues and it is this contextual relevance of situational issues which ensures that excellence and a sense of belonging reinforce the explanatory potential of authentic leadership. Authentic leaders seek to evoke in followers a sense of non-authoritarian and non-heroic leadership practice in the attempt to separate leadership from the authoritarianism of the primal father figure. When authenticity is used to predict organizational outcomes with sense of contribution omitted as an indicator, then authenticity explains 58.7% of the variance of organizational outcomes. This means that when sense of contribution is omitted from the model, the variance explained of organizational outcomes increases by more than 8%. This again reinforces the finding that authenticity does not reinforce sense of contribution as much as it determines sense of belonging and sense of freedom. Acknowledgement of weaknesses associated with cognitive abilities, motivation, social cognition and group dynamics is an important element of authentic leadership. Acknowledgement of such weaknesses increase the sense of belonging and perceptions of leaders being self-aware, balanced and transparent.