Authentic Leadership

Abstract

Leadership has been widely studied and recognized as important over time. This chapter has two main objectives. The first one is to analyse the perceptions that individuals have about leadership, either as a trait or a process, and the extent to which such perceptions are influenced by age. Secondly, the chapter aims to understand the presence of authentic leaders and if a person's age defines the relevance of this type of leadership. To attain these purposes, the concept of leadership is analyzed, as the transactional and transformation styles of leadership, as well as the characteristics of Generation Z. A quantitative methodology was chosen to achieve these goals through a survey based on the authentic leadership questionnaire. The results analysis reveals that age condition, even if in a very tenuous way, influences an individual's level of authentic leadership and how leadership is perceived.