I’ve been taking the approach of trying to find examples of the various leadership styles we have read about in our lessons and writing about them in my blog. This week I read a little ahead into the Authentic Leadership approach for use in another assignment and thought that this was an excellent subject to focus on in this week’s blog post. What exactly is authentic leadership?
Walumbwa et al defines authentic leadership as “a pattern of leader behavior that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capabilities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, and internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of the leader working with followers fostering positive self-development” (Walumbwa, 2008, p. 94). Although this is a rather long and seemingly complex definition, it does call out specific areas that can be focused upon such as a positive ethical climate, internalized moral perspective, and transparency.
The Authentic leadership approach has three main areas including Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and developmental perspectives. The intrapersonal perspective centers on what is going on within the leader, how they perceive themselves, and how they interact with followers. The interpersonal perspective focuses not only on the leader but also the followers, how they interact together, and their relationship. Finally, the developmental approach looks towards developing and improving leaders as opposed to viewing authentic leadership as a fixed characteristic (Pennsylvania State University, 2014, p. 3).
While I personally enjoy the developmental approach, I decided to focus more on authentic leadership as a theory and seek an example that exemplified these core concepts. Unlike the other leadership approaches I have read so far, I found it difficult to find a solid example from all the great leader’s that I encounter on a daily basis. This appears to be a very high standard when evaluating leadership. The closest person I could find is Major Young Kim, CECOM Chaplain.
Chaplin Kim is an energetic, friendly, and trustworthy leader that can always be counted on to brighten your day and be there for you when things are not going well. I had the opportunity to observe Chaplin Kim recently during a time period when many people in the command were under stress from war-time deployments, facing cuts in pay from furloughs, and threats of layoffs. The best word to describe Major Kim was authentic…he really cared.
There are four psychological areas associated with an authentic leader. They are confidence, hope, optimism, and resilience (Northouse, 2013, p. 264). These four attributes immediately made me think of Chaplin Kim. Confidence refers to the belief in the ability to accomplish a task. Hope is “a positive motivational state based on willpower and goal planning.” Optimism involves having a favorable outlook about the future. Finally, resilience is the ability to recover and adjust from adverse conditions (Northouse, 2013, p. 265).
Clearly Chaplin Kim not only exemplifies these characteristics, but he also has a clear and unwavering sense of moral reasoning as well. Moral reasoning is “the capacity to make ethical decisions about issues of right and wrong” (Northouse, 2013, p. 265). It is his mastery of these clear and honest traits that make him authentic. This is what makes him trustworthy enough to follow him.
Although I know it would be difficult to objectively measure the effectiveness of a leader using the authentic construct, I believe that this is one of the more important of the leadership theories. Do we measure Chaplin Kim by how many soles he saves or simply how many lives he is able to improve?
In the end, the absolute value of whatever metric we use to gauge authentic leadership success is less important than the individual impact a follower receives from a genuine leader. It is not easy to be an authentic leader; it requires hard work. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to find acceptable examples. An authentic leader is the prime example; the pinnacle of how we expect our ideal leaders to behave…and Chaplin Kim sets this bar very high.
Works Cited
Northouse, P. (2013). Leadership, Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Pennsylvania State University. (2014). PSYCH485 Lesson 12. University Park, PA, USA.
Walumbwa, F. A. (2008). Authentic Leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management.