Authentic leadership and employee psychological well-being: An integrated review of the literature

Abstract

As we known that one resource that supports work of employee is a good relationship among the leader and co-workers. Leaders who have styles that are able to improve employees' psychological well-being by making workplaces healthy, do not neglect supervision, are able to motivate employees, and reflect values that are important to employees (see, Hsiung 2012; Winkler et al. 2015; Huang et al. 2016; Joo, Park, & Lim 2016). There seems to be general agreement that effective leadership will encourage positive employee attitudes and behaviour (e.g., Fong & Snape 2015; Afsar, Badir & Kiani 2016; Semedo, Coelho, & Ribeiro 2016; Wu & Lee 2017; Kim & Beehr 2018; Buil , Martinez, & Matute 2019; Mostafa & Bottomley 2020). Meanwhile, most of the previous studies link that authentic leadership also has a negative influence on employees, such as: employee silence (Guenter et al. 2016); job stress (Weiss, et al. 2017); cynicism and immodesty (A Megeirhi, et al. 2018); burnout (Fair & Kamal 2019); management culture errors (Farnese et al. 2018); and turnover intentions (Gordon et al. 2019). Researchers found that only a few studied the relationship between authentic leadership and employee psychological well-being. There is only one study that examines this by using work climate as mediator variable in the type of nurse's work. Research conducted by Nelson et al. (2014) which states that authentic leadership has been recognized to influence psychological well-being through its impact on the work climate. Moving on from these issues, the interests of employees in Indonesia should be considered because the employee is required to work for eight hours a day and employees are working to make ends meet. Keywords: authentic leadership, psychological well-being, mediators, moderators, integrated review.