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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between sales managers’ authentic leadership style and salespeople’s positive development.

Multilevel regression analysis was used to examine the data from 40 work teams from several Spanish retail companies (190 salespeople and 40 sales managers).

In line with previous studies, the analyses indicated that sales managers’ authentic leadership style as perceived by employees significantly predicted salespeople’s work engagement and psychological capital (PsyCap). Contrary to the expectations, salespeople’s perceptions of sales managers’ authentic leadership did not relate to sales managers’ self-ratings of authentic leadership, but instead related to sales managers’ gender (women were perceived as more authentic) and higher perceived frequency of leader–follower interaction.

The study contributes to the literature by testing if sales managers’ variables (gender and self-ratings of authentic leadership and perceived frequency of leader–follower interaction) predict salespeople’s perceptions of authentic leadership, which in turn, predict salespeople’s positive development (work engagement and PsyCap).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between employees’ perception of authentic leadership and their turnover intention as mediated by employees’ work-group identification (WID) and work engagement.

Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data from 623 Spanish employees.

Results show that authentic leadership has a negative effect on turnover intention and positive effects on work engagement and WID. The direct relationship between authentic leadership and turnover intention was found to be partially mediated by employees’ work engagement.

One of the strongest implications that may be drawn from this study is that authentic leaders can influence employees’ turnover intentions by positively enhancing their engagement. Thus, the study highlights authentic leadership as a key element for retaining valuable employees through the promotion of employees’ work engagement.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the association between authentic leadership and turnover intention and the meditational effect of work engagement and WID.