Commonalities and specificities of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand

Abstract

The authentic leadership literature suggests that there are three critical elements that precede the bestowal of authentic leadership: first, the espoused values and actions of authentic leaders must be congruent; second, the expectation of the leaders and the followers must be congruent; and, third, the leaders must behave with high moral integrity for the good of their subordinates, the organization and the community. These features of authentic leadership involve subjective interpretation, and therefore evaluations of it may vary in different settings. This study used the Q method to compare leaders’ and followers’ constructs of authentic leadership in Ghana and New Zealand. Thirty leaders and followers in each of the organizations studied in Ghana and New Zealand sorted selected statements about authentic leadership. Three factors or types of authentic leadership were identified and named for each of the four settings. While these results suggest that authentic leadership is idiosyncratic, further analysis showed that some attributes of authentic leadership were common to the organizations, and some were common to the countries. These findings confirmed that in order to encourage and support authentic leadership, it is necessary to consider an ‘employee-centric’ approach in which followers’ viewpoints are given full recognition. Further, effective leadership training programmes needed to be tailored to specific organizations in specific contexts to achieve desirable outcomes for organizations.