The Development of an Authentic Leadership Model and an Empirical Validation

Abstract

Authentic leadership has recently been a very popular scientific area, but with only a few quantitative analyses. The aim of this paper is to develop a research model of the impact of authentic leadership on authentic followership and on the results from the employees' perspective. We use empirical quantitative analysis to confirm the model with linear structural modeling on a sample of 22 managers and 289 of their employees in a Slovenian company with approximately 500 employees. The construct of authentic leadership in the research model consists of self-awareness, self-regulation, positive psychological capital and positive modeling. The results showed that perceived authenticity of a leader has an impact on authentic followership. There was also a significant positive impact of authentic followership on results from the employees' perspective. Based on the results, we have confirmed that authentic leaders create new authentic employees, develop their authentic features and capabilities, resulting in employee satisfaction, their loyalty and a good atmosphere within the team.