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The purpose of this study is to provide preliminary insights into the relationships between self-monitoring, emotional expressivity, emotional labor, felt leader authenticity, and authentic leadership (AL) within a unique context – West Texas Baptist congregations. Using a sample of 40 Baptist pastors, we employed survey research methods and correlational analyses to explore the focal relationships. Our results revealed that self-monitoring is positively correlated with surface acting, yet negatively associated with AL, within our sample of West Texas Baptist pastors. Emotional expressivity is negatively related to surface acting, but not deep acting, and positively related to genuine emotional displays. We also found that surface acting is negatively associated with genuine emotion displays and felt authenticity, while felt authenticity and AL are positively correlated. However, no relationships between self-monitoring, deep acting, felt authenticity, and AL were revealed. Thus, we identified cases where leader authenticity may be threatened within an organizational context with strong emotional display rules, suggesting a boundary condition for AL. Additionally, we advance propositions gleaned from our research regarding the influence of the omnibus (e.g., community religiosity) and discrete context on leader emotional labor and authenticity. We conclude with practical recommendations for leaders seeking to balance authenticity with emotional display rules associated with unique roles and contexts, as well as recommendations for scholars seeking to conduct research in such settings. We also provide candid insights regarding the challenges we encountered in researching leader authenticity within a highly religious context.

This diary study tested some propositions to determine the effect of discrete emotions on three dimensions of emotional labor and their consequent effect on leaders and follower’s perception about leaders’ authenticity.

The data were collected from a cohort of city traffic police consisting 69 police officials at four different time points between their two shifts using experience sampling method. The data were analyzed using the latest technique known as latent growth curve modeling.

The statistical results demonstrated that negative emotions were negatively associated with deep-acting and three forms of emotional labor did not significantly affect followers’ perception about leaders’ authenticity. This study also demonstrated that surface-acting is not significantly associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity, but genuine-acting and deep-acting were negatively associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity.

This study also offers certain implications for policing officials for improve authentic behavior through daily emotional displays in policing organizations.

This study offers some practical implications for policing officials about emotion regulation strategies during policing practices with respect to the authentic sense of the leaders as well as the followers.

This study offers an insight about how emotional labor affects the perceptions of policing officers about the authenticity of their leaders in the context of traffic police.

This chapter introduces the aims, objectives and potential outreach of the handbook. The handbook is both a quest for insights from leadership theory and practice in the contemporary world and a manifesto for leadership training through a value-based approach to authenticity. Contributors in this handbook do not belong to the orthodox authentic leadership community. They offer varied, provocative views and personal case studies of leadership. Some endorse aspects of the concept of authentic leadership while developing new understanding of authenticity, others suggest that it is flawed; others offer fresh, challenging, leadership insights. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to all chapters in the handbook.

This chapter critically reviews the literature on authentic leadership (AL) that emerged in response to scandals in private- and public-sector organisations, drawing on theories, concepts and methods from other disciplines. The author finds that AL lacks a consensus definition, and that quantitative research has largely been at the level of employees rather than executives or board members. The review reveals 12 categories of criticisms. Schaefler advocates inductive qualitative research on the major concerns of executive leaders and means of addressing them via group dynamics, maintaining that exploring processes of AL in real-world settings would complement existing quantitative research and contribute to the development and extension of AL theory.

Authenticity, or the extent to which individuals act in accordance with their values, beliefs and characteristics, is recognized as a key component of a fulfilled life. However, little is known about its antecedents in an organizational context. Drawing on goal-setting theory and the broaden-and-build theory, the current study examined the role of team leaders' perceived shared vision in promoting their work authenticity, mediated through strengths use support (SUS) for members as well as leaders' strengths use.

A two-wave questionnaire survey was conducted to test the hypotheses using a sample of 325 middle managers of a manufacturing firm.

The results of structural equation modeling show that perceived shared vision promoted work authenticity, mediated through SUS and strengths use.

This study is the first to identify that shared goals can trigger authenticity at work by directing the leader to use their strengths, alongside their team members.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

This study aims to investigate the research question: how do women leaders in the professional business services (PBS) sector develop and approach workplace (in)authenticity?

Ten senior women leaders in the Midlands region of the UK were purposefully selected and interviewed. A semi-structured approach meant that the author adopted a social constructionist paradigm and feminist interpretation. Questions were designed to elicit rich descriptions from the participants. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted to address the study’s purpose.

Four themes were important to women when they developed and approached workplace (in)authenticity: (1) Power Structures, (2) Fit to Belong, (3) Influential Femininity and (4) Through Her Evolution. Women described masculine-majority organisations exerting power. They were pressured into altering their behaviours to “fit” into workplaces. When women had the latitude to be themselves, their leadership excelled. Women’s authenticity developed through increased self-knowledge, helping them to overcome workplace challenges. The study concluded that women face complexities when developing and approaching their constructions of authenticity, namely in the barriers and ramifications they face.

The study suggests several implications for practice and theory concerning enablers and barriers to women leaders' workplace authenticity. The link between authenticity and workplace gender equity needs to be investigated.

The study provides evidence that women are challenged when becoming authentic, therefore, altering their careers irrecoverably in some cases.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the body of knowledge of authentic leadership in extreme contexts by developing a framework grounded in the Sartrean existentialist perspective on authenticity and illustrating this framework using the works of Xenophon.

The authors use Sartre’s existential view of authenticity to develop a framework of authentic leadership in extreme contexts. They then use this framework to examine Xenophon’s recount of the retreat of the 10,000 in the classic work, Anabasis. For this analysis, the authors iterate between the ideas of the past and the concepts of the present to understand how this classic has influenced and informed the current body of knowledge about leadership.

Using a Sartrean existentialist lens, “in extremis” authentic leaders exhibit an awareness of context extremity, responsibility in leading and following to share risks in extreme contexts and self-determination that inspires mutual trust and loyalty.

A Sartrean existentialist perspective suggests that authentic leaders in extreme contexts reflect authenticity by exhibiting and encouraging freedom of choice. By espousing this perspective, authentic leaders create common goals and interests that appeal to followers' intrinsic motivation which has been found to result in positive individual and organizational outcomes.

This paper contributes to the authentic leadership literature by using an existential conceptualization of authenticity to examine leadership in extreme contexts. This conceptualization might be more appropriate than the Aristotelian virtue-based deterministic philosophy that has dominated authentic leadership research.

This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between the leader characteristic of humility and the informal learning of team members. It also evaluates the role of leader authenticity in mediating that relationship.

Data were collected on 518 salespeople reporting to 66 managers in a time-lagged study of a financial services firm. Generalized structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test a multi-hierarchical mediation model.

Leader humility has a significant positive direct and indirect effect on individual informal learning in team contexts, and leader authenticity partially mediates this relationship.

This study advances research on how leaders can help transform learning from a risky endeavor to a daily practice. It shows the impact of the leadership characteristic of humility and explains how humble behaviors provide a model for individual learning in team contexts. It also reveals that leader authenticity is a key mechanism through which leader humility comes to influence employees’ informal learning within work teams.

This study provides empirical support for the importance of leader humility in engendering the trust required for employees to engage in everyday workplace learning. It integrates social information processing theory with social learning theory to show that humble leaders provide critical information about the value, cost and methods of individual informal learning in team contexts. Leader humility increases employees’ beliefs that they can and do learn from working in teams because employees perceive the humble leader’s behaviors as representing the leader’s true intentions.

This chapter examines how elected politicians exercise their role as leaders (managers) of public services by employing three concepts: accountability, trust and authenticity. Political leaders have an obligation to their electors and the public services that they lead. Lord German examines this dual accountability. He maintains that the mediation of political power and leadership through interaction with a permanent civil service offers a rich field for interdisciplinary research. He suggests that authenticity in the political sphere has two dimensions which may not align: political authenticity and organisational authenticity. Lord German argues that both of these offer potential for research and the reinterpretation of authenticity in the political arena.