Sincere Leadership Theory Research

In the early21th century, American scholars put forward the Authentic Leadership Theory, on the basement of organizational behavior theory, positive psychological theory and transformational leadership theory. After the years of development, the definition of authentic leadership is from broad to centralization. Now, scholars generally define it as a leadership behavior model that can make good use of leaders’ positive psychological capacities and highly developed organizational context, it helps the leader and his followers get the higher levels of self-awareness, morality, the balance of information processing and relationship transparency, and it can also create a harmonious working environment, and finally, it stimulates a positive self-development of leaders, followers and organizations. Authentic leader has a strong sense of self, they know their own minds very well, and they will not change their authentic behaviors in order to cater to outside requests. These outstanding qualities also can influence the followers on maintaining a positive, optimistic, self-confidence mind and a high level of moral literacy. Through authentic acting, leaders can get the trust and supports from the followers. In the end, a lasting and authentic work environment is established, and people work together for completing the shared tasks of the organization. At present, the authentic leadership theory is still in developing, it has some limitations and shortcomings, although there are a lot of innovations. For instance, a smaller number of measurements and empirical studies be used on authentic leadership, this may be an important breakthrough for the scholars.This thesis analyses the theory in the literature methods, including the contents, the generation and development, preliminary evaluation on the theory, and then it also looks forward to the theory’s futurity. In addition, this thesis explores the use of authentic leadership in the organization, specially for school leadership. The thesis makes a point that the authentic leadership can be developed from the enhancing the school leaders’ morality and acting, in order to make school leaders’ to select authentic behaviors. As a result, teachers, leaders and the schools all can get a great progress.