The Building Blocks of Authentic Leadership: Being Consistent and Being Seen

In recent years, leadership research has focused on the concept of “authentic leaders” who act consistently with their values, make balanced decisions, are self-aware, and are transparent in their relationships (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson, 2008). Authentic leaders have the dual tasks of remaining true to their own values and beliefs (in order to be perceived as authentic) and simultaneously projecting an expressive persona (in order to be perceived as a leader). In this research, personality (extraversion and conscientiousness) and impression management (self-monitoring) constructs are used to capture the aspects of authentic leadership that reflect authenticity (expressiveness and other-directedness) and are shown to predict authentic leadership using ratings of followers. The analysis also includes the different dimensions of the self-monitoring scale, using mini-scales that reflect expressiveness (public-performing) and consistency (other-directedness or self-directedness), and show that they predict authenticity in leaders using self-ratings of leaders. The studies help to explain which leaders meet the challenge of being themselves and projecting their persona. Finally, there is evidence that authentic leadership is a mediator of the relationship between previously studied personality variables (extraversion and conscientiousness) and job satisfaction.