Limits of authenticity: How organizational politics bound the positive effects of authentic leadership on follower satisfaction and performance

Abstract

The authentic leadership paradigm has been widely advocated as an effective leadership approach for organizations interested in promoting positive and ethical leader—member relations. Despite accumulating evidence concerning the positive follower effects of authentic leadership, research examining potential boundary conditions remains limited. The political influence theoretical perspective promises to shed new light on the effects of authentic leadership by proposing that authentic leadership may be less effective in political contexts, bounding its positive operation on followers. Specifically, we anticipate that organizational politics will erode the motivational power of authentic leaders on followers, reducing their ability to engender positive performance contributions in followers. We also predict that organizational politics will weaken the positive relationship between authentic leadership and job satisfaction by reducing the ability of employees to realize their goals at work. To explore these theoretical assertions, we incorporated a two‐study functional replication (n1 = 265; n2 = 175) to ascertain how authentic leadership and organizational politics impact follower job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and task performance. We find that organizational politics consistently weaken the positive effects of authentic leadership on follower OCB across two studies. Furthermore, in Study 2, our findings suggest that organizational politics attenuate the positive impact of authentic leadership on follower job satisfaction and task performance. We discuss theoretical and practical implications.

Effect of Chief Executive Officer’s Sustainable Leadership Styles on Organization Members’ Psychological Well-Being and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

“…Authentic leadership is defined based on the concept of authenticity [53,54]. Authenticity refers to self-awareness and consistency of inner thoughts, emotions, and values.…”

“…Finally, authentic leadership involves clear awareness of goals, putting firm values into actions, and openly communicating with the organization members. In other words, authentic leaders are not leaders who are given the authority, but those who inspire people to work based on their sincerity [53,54]. They take care of organization members, nurture them, help them build confidence, teach them skills, and discipline them if necessary to lead them to achieve more than what they would otherwise be capable of.…”

“…They take care of organization members, nurture them, help them build confidence, teach them skills, and discipline them if necessary to lead them to achieve more than what they would otherwise be capable of. Therefore, authentic leadership insists on discarding the third-person model, in which the company creates stories and styles of the leader in a uniform fashion and forces members to adopt it [53,54]. Authentic leadership advocates democratization so that organization members can create leadership styles for individual leaders.…”

The impact of authentic leadership on employees' organizational citizenship behavior in Ethiopia public service

“…Moreover, recent literature has started to examine the limit of authenticity. Hence, politics consistently decreases the constructive impacts of authentic leadership on employees' organizational citizenship behavior (Munyon, Houghton, Simarasl, Dawley, & Howe, 2021), decreases the potential of authentic leaders (Lee, Bradburn, Johnson, Lin, & Chang, 2019), limits employees' helping behavior (Munyon et al, 2021).…”

“…The innovative finding of this study contributes to the authentic leadership literature and its positive influence on public employees' OCB. Furthermore, politics negatively affects authentic leadership's positive role in employees' OCB (Munyon et al, 2021). Besides, public service organizations are expected to engage in OCB as the sector has different characteristics (Cohen & Vigoda, 2000).…”