Commonalities and specificities of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand

Abstract

The authentic leadership literature suggests that there are three critical elements that precede the bestowal of authentic leadership: first, the espoused values and actions of authentic leaders must be congruent; second, the expectation of the leaders and the followers must be congruent; and, third, the leaders must behave with high moral integrity for the good of their subordinates, the organization and the community. These features of authentic leadership involve subjective interpretation, and therefore evaluations of it may vary in different settings. This study used the Q method to compare leaders' and followers' constructs of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand. Thirty leaders and followers in each of the organizations studied in Ghana and New Zealand sorted selected statements about authentic leadership. Three factors or types of authentic leadership were identified and named for each of the four settings. While these results suggest that authentic leadership is idiosyncratic, further analysis showed that some attributes of authentic leadership were common to the organizations, and some were common to the countries. These findings confirmed that in order to encourage and support authentic leadership, it is necessary to consider an 'employee-centric' approach in which followers' viewpoints are given full recognition. Further, effective leadership training programmes needed to be tailored to specific organizations in specific contexts to achieve desirable outcomes for organizations.

Bringing context out of the shadows of leadership

“…There is no reason why this should not be the case in EDLM research. Unfortunately, to date, even two- or three-country, quantitative cross-cultural comparative studies (Owusu-Bempah et al, 2014) remain rare in EDLM (Dimmock and Walker, 2005; Hallinger and Bryant, 2013a, 2013b). Large-scale quantitative studies (Lee and Hallinger, 2012) are conspicuous by their almost total absence.…”

Surfacing a hidden literature

“…Less prominent than studies of institutional and social context were investigations of how the 'sociocultural context' of African education impacts leadership, management and school processes (e.g. Blunt and Jones, 1997;Bolden and Kirk, 2009;Bush, 2013;Fourie et al, 2015;Khalifa et al, 2014;Moneim, 2007;Msila, 2008Msila, , 2014Owusu-Bempah et al, 2014). A smaller, but still significant number of studies sought to understand how more narrowly construed 'organizational contexts' shaped leadership and management practices.…”

Teachers’ perceptions of school leaders’ empowering behaviours and psychological empowerment

“…Although existing school leadership research has identified a number of effective school leadership styles such as transformational leadership, instructional leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership and distributed leadership (e.g. Dimmock, 2011; Gronn, 1996; Hallinger and Heck, 2002; Jantzi and Leithwood, 1996; Ng and Ho, 2012; Owusu-Bempah et al, 2014; Shatzer et al, 2014; Yu et al, 2002), most of the empirical studies did not explicitly clarify which are the ‘empowering’ elements in these different styles or practices of school leadership. As a result, it is unclear which specific behaviours of school leaders are perceived as ‘empowering’ by the teachers, especially in inducing a sense of empowerment (or psychological empowerment) among the teachers to motivate them to perform their best at work.…”