Authentic Leadership Links Between Physical Activity, Mindfulness, and Emotional Competenc

Leadership is critical to any work environment, and has been widely recognized in the literature as a critical success factor for the health and progress of businesses. A recent addition to the number of leadership theories is the authentic leadership theory, which is rapidly becoming clarified as new applications and refinements of the construct have been proposed and accepted. Authentic leadership theory has sparked new approaches in organizational applied and academic research as the scholarly community seeks to understand authenticity and its meaning for leadership theory and practice. The purpose of the present quantitative correlational study was to assess the relationship between the characteristics of authentic leadership and four variables: physical activity, mindfulness, and emotional competence for the -self and for -others. Those constructs represent the investigation of interrelationships between leadership, body, mind, and emotions in regards to the whole-human. Four separate instruments were administered to 350 participants measuring attribute variables on a continuous Likert type scale for both levels and activities. The initial results were tested with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) statistical processes to fully investigate and refine potential relationships of the latent variables and their factor indicators. Analysis of resulting data was hindered by the presence of a Heywood Case that rendered the proposed structural equation model results unusable. An alternative model consisting of the same variables was specified consolidating all the factor indicators at scale level factor. The consolidated model was used to evaluate study hypotheses using path analysis. The findings using Maximum Likelihood Estimation methodology showed that three of four of the direct relationships tested were found to be significant with mindfulness being found not to be significantly related to authentic leadership characteristics. All three of the study indirect relationships were found to be significant. No significant findings were identified for millennials in regards to the variables of interest.