The Impact Of Authentic Leadership On Employees’ Work Engagement

With economy boosting, managers and scholars realize that the upswinging corporatescandals and management malfeasance call for a new perspective on leadership. Positiveleadership will be a good way to reduce credit crisis. On the other hand, the current upswingin employees’ job burnout also indicates that the organization needs to employ an effectiveway to make employees more engaged at work. As an emerging leadership theory based onpositive organizational behavior(POB), authentic leadership is considered as positiveleadership to foster positive organizational behaviors. Thus, in this paper, my research willfocus on how to improve employees’ work engagement with authentic leadership.The theory of authentic leadership is based on leadership, ethics, positive psychologyand positive organizational behavior. Authentic leadership is a pattern of leader behavior thatdraws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate,to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing ofinformation, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers,fostering positive self-development. Researches showed that authentic leadership can forecastemployees’ social identity, attitudes, satisfaction and positive working behavior.With the foundation of POB, emerging leadership theories and social identity theory, thispaper will research the impact of authentic leadership on employees’ work engagement fromthe perspective of social identity, to find out whether authentic leadership can affect workengagement through foster employees’ organizational identification. Therefore the managerialimplication will be discussed.After theoretical derivation and questionnaire survey with283employees, my researchgot the following results:(1) authentic leadership can positively affect employees’ workengagement, and the two perspective,―self-awareness‖and―internal morality‖,playsignificant roles in the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement.(2)Authentic leadership can positively affect employees’ organizational identification.(3)Organizational identification can partly mediate the relation between authentic leadership andwork engagement. Some conclusions draw from those results above as follows:(1)organizations canimprove employees’ work engagement with authentic leadership.(2) In leading process, tostrengthen leaders’ self-awareness and internal morality will help to improve employees’engagement at work.(3) Organizational identification can be improved through fostering apositive organizational climate, thus can improve work engagement.(4) Balance processingand relational transparency can also benefit the organizaitions.