The Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Authentic Leadership And Organizational Citizenship Behavior

With a series of accounting scandals on Wall Street exposure, the concept of Authentic Leadership was introduced by Bill George in 2003. For the reason that long term chasseing of perfect performance, employees had lost their trusts to all these ugly and cruel realities. Those in-authentic behaviors of leaders cast a shadow over the whole community. In China, confidence crises (e.g. San Lun milk powder incident) had brought great challenges to Chinese enterprises recent year, which reflects a large number of business integrity situations. Leaders had been placed great expectations to rebuild credibility as the core figure of an enterprise. At the same time, many entrepreneurs and scholars are wondering is there any conflict between pursing authentic and business performance, especially the economic profit? Will Authentic Leadership bring more presence on Organization Citizenship Behavior since it is known as "extra-role" could enhance business performance? Will the Chinese "Circle" culture influence the procedure that Authentic Leadership affect to Organization Citizenship Behavior. This study led with practical significance, which not only suggested a standard for business leaders to improve their integrity, but also provided a theoretical basis to the effectiveness of leadership.The research of Authentic Leadership is still on its early stage, therefore, unified conclusion can not be found among the limited literatures. Chinese scholars who concerned to this issue are even less, and most of them remains in the collations and summarized the theatrical basis. Xie Hengxiao (2007) has proposed a scenario based on the Chinese leadership structure contents (i.e. CPM theory), which is not exactly same as the Western literatures, and there is no following confirmation proves. Furthermore, limited empirical articles had discussed the relationship between Authentic Leadership and other variances in further step which consist of the motivations for this study.This article suggested four dimensions of Authentic Leadership based on the content proposed by Xie (2007), and integrate two core concepts "self awareness" and "internalized moral perspective" proposed by Walumbwa et al. (2008). Meanwhile, it discussed the predict impacts that Authentic Leadership to OCB and LMX as independent variance. Since three variances are not a single-dimension structure and all with wide range of extensions. Our study not only exploded from the conceptual level, but also discussed various dimensions of the correlations deeply into factor level. The research presented 22 hypotheses based on theoretical reviews, and collected required data by using questionnaire surveys. Statistic calculations had then operated in SPSS 11.5 and LISREL8.7, which including regression analysis, structural equation modeling and other statistical methods to verify the proposed assumptions.The Conclusive researches of this study are shown as follows.1) Based on the content proposed by Xie Hengxiao (2007) and Walumbwa et al. (2008), this article concluded that Authentic Leadership consists of four dimensions, "subordinate-oriented", "internalized moral perspective", "leadership qualities" and "honesty". This four-dimensional structure was verified with good reliability and validity, as well as with moderate correlation. However, compared with the relatively maturity discussion in OCB and LMX, the structure of Authentic Leadership still not as good as these two both in the model fitting and specific items, therefore, further studies and verifications of the Authentic Leadership Scale is necessary, and our study provided with a reference basis for improving for next step.2) Authentic Leadership has significant effect on Organizational Citizenship Behaviors. This study collected empirical data in China, and the result shows that Authentic Leadership as a second order concept affects OCB in a significant level (p <.001), and the cumulative of explanation reaches to 24.5%. Specifically, a) "internalized moral perspectives" significantly positive influence on "self-management" (y=.38); b) "leadership qualities" significantly positive influence on "initiative behavior" (y=.21); c) "Honesty" significantly positive influence on "Help staff"(y=.23).3) Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) quality is a mediator variance affects the process between Authentic Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. The regression analysis result indicated LMX is a partly mediator variance as a second-order concept affects the process between Authentic Leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Furthermore, the research examined the mediator influence of specific three dimensions of LMX used three-step testing method proposed by Wen Zhonglin. The result shows that all three dimensions are partly mediators of this process. Especially, LMX is complete mediator between "leader qualities" and "initiative behavior". 4) The influence of organizations and individual characteristics are limited. The research examined the influence of organizational and individual characteristics (both leaders and employees), the result states, a) Ownership has significant impact on "subordinate-oriented" and "leadership qualities"; b) Leader's age, education level and serve years have significant impacts on the most dimensions of Authentic Leadership; c) Leader's marriage status is only significantly impacts on "supporting the participation"; d) The consistency between leaders and their subordinates on gender, age, marriage status and education level will not improve LMX qualities; e) Compared with Authentic Leadership, organizational and personal characteristics had limited influence to OCB and LMX with their cumulative of explanation only reach to about 0.2%.