AntonJayTan Thu 21 Oct 2010, 3:01 pm
During the old times, leaders already exist and until now in the present time. Leaders are the key figures of nations and countries. The word leader and leadership itself is a broad word with lots of definition and concepts that can be derived from.
The concept of leadership and leaders can be used in a variety of setting including the public or private sectors, school and in the health care system.
Leadership is a subset of action. But not all action is authentic leadership. Leadership is authentic action, a unique and honorific mode of engagement in life.(Terry,1993) Authenticity is knowing, and acting on, what is true and real inside yourself, your team and your organization AND knowing and acting on what is true and real in the world. It is not enough to walk one’s talk if one is headed off, or leading one’s organization, community or nation, off a cliff.(Terry,1993)
The word authentic derives originally from Greek sources meaning one who accomplishes. To be authentic is to act, to embody and to participate in life. Webster’s New International Unabridged Dictionary defines authenticity as “fidelity, actuality and fact, compatibility with a certain source or origin, accordance with usage or tradition, a complete sincerity without feigning or hypocrisy.”(Terry,1993)
So to be truly genuine - or authentic -a leader requires a few things: To ensure that one's corporate actions and rhetoric are aligned; to ensure that such actions are meaningful (as opposed to superficial, headline-grabbing actions that don't take root beyond the organization's need for disingenuous publicity); and to ensure that one's public persona and private core are not at odds.(Fenson,2000)
In any organization, an authentic leader gets ahead of the often unavoidable, sometimes unpleasant business realities, and communicates both realities and possibilities in a context of uncompromising honesty. He or she withstands the temptation to adopt popular buzzwords if he knows there's inadequate commitment to long-term support required for an initiative or ideal to take root and survive. She doesn't pretend the company has no hierarchy when both its size and its production requirements make hierarchy of some sort a necessity.(Fenson,2000)
Authentic leadership may indeed be more possible in privately owned companies, given the tremendous pressure on leaders in public companies to squeeze every possible penny of profit for shareholders, regardless of the deleterious effect on the organization's culture, employees, or customers. Are the chief executives of large, public companies - like most politicians – more like actors than true leaders? (Fenson,2000)
Even researches are done to measure authentic leadership. The importance of authentic approaches to leadership is far reaching in both the research and practitioner domains. Economic, geo-political, and technological developments over the past few decades have placed demands on leaders that require them to be transparent, be aware of their values, and guide organizations with a moral/ethical perspective. (Avey, Smith et al,2009)
More recent reviews of leadership theory also highlight that the future direction of leadership research must move away from a hierarchical, leader-centric approach to a more integrative approach in which followers, context, and group levels of analysis are hypothesized and tested to advance leadership theory (Avolio, 2007; Johns, 2006; Meindl, 1995). Furthermore, there is a continued call for leadership research to quantify how leadership behaviors can impact organizational outcomes such as firm performance (Avolio, 2007)
Guide questions:
1. How can we relate the above excerpts to Wong’s Authentic leadership theory? Does Wong’s article clarified the definition of authentic leadership?
2. In your own opinion or experiences, have you ever been a authentic leader during your undergraduate years or even in the present time?
3. In the Philippine hospital setting, does head nurses and supervisors use authentic leadership?
References:
Bob Terry (1993), Authentic Leadership: Courage in Action
Authentic Leadership: Looking in the Mirror, Sarah Fenson (2000)
Authentic leadership and positive psychological capital: the mediating role of trust at the group level of analysis. Avey, Smith et al (2009)