Copyright Forbes
How a feel-good theory lost touch with reality. Among the many psychological ideas that have invaded management thinking and practices in the past three decades, few are as popular as “authentic leadership”. Although there is no universal definition or model for the term, authentic leadership theories generally converge around the idea that effective leadership stems from self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency — in short, being “true to oneself” and acting consistently with one’s values. The basic claim, then, is that authentic leaders are genuine, self-aware, and guided by moral conviction rather than external pressures or performative motives, and that this authenticity builds trust and engagement among followers. Enthusiasts of authentic leadership may rightly point out that there is much empirical research highlighting the benefits of this trait vis-a-vis desirable organizational outcomes, including the impact on followers, employees, and leaders’ themselves. Most notably, in a widely-cited landmark study, the predictive validity of authentic leadership was tested across five independent samples (U.S., China, and Kenya) using both multi-source ratings and objective outcome measures. The Authentic Leadership Questionnaire was primarily based on other-ratings, that is, followers’ or employees’ views of the leader rather than leader’s self-views. In other words, the study assessed how self-aware, values-based, objective, and transparent leaders are in the eyes of others. The researchers found that authentic leadership scores significantly predicted follower job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviors. In one of the U.S. samples, supervisor-rated performance of followers was also positively related to authentic leadership, suggesting a tangible link to task outcomes. The pattern of results held consistently across cultures, with coefficients typically ranging between .25 and .40, accounting for around 10% of the variability in the outcomes examined. In all, this evidence demonstrated that when leaders are perceived as authentic by their subordinates, followers not only feel more engaged and loyal but also perform better. MORE FOR YOU To be sure, several studies suggest that the benefits of authentic leadership are not as clear. For instance, successful attempts to increase authentic leadership behaviors tend to boost trust but have no significant impact on employee job satisfaction or commitment. Also, not many studies report tangible correlations between authentic leadership and hard metrics of performance, especially at the business or organizational level of analysis. Moreover, authentic leadership seems to offer nothing new over and above other, older and more established, forms of leadership, such as transformational leadership. For example, a large meta-analysis shows that transformational leadership, which refers to leaders who inspire followers through vision, moral example, intellectual stimulation, and individualized support (motivating people to exceed expectations), showed that authentic leadership overlaps almost completely with this model (correlation ≈ .72), and adds virtually no unique predictive power for outcomes such as satisfaction, performance, or effectiveness. In other words, “authentic leadership” is largely a rebranding of transformational leadership dressed up in moral language rather than a genuinely new construct. Same goes for ethical and servant leadership: they are empirically indistinguishable from authentic leadership, and perhaps any other positive or idealized form of leadership. Importantly, even when other-reports (peer-ratings) of authentic leadership do correlate with desirable outcomes, it is likely that such correlations are merely emerging as a function of the positive conflation - what is known as a halo effect - between different kinds of positive attributions or inferences made about the same person. In other words, just because we move from using self-reports to other-reports doesn’t mean we achieve any degree of objectivity in measuring independent traits or qualities: people who self-rate highly on some attributes also self-rate highly on others, and people who rate others highly on some attributes also rate them highly on others. As recent studies show, the widely-used positive leadership style constructs — not just authentic, but also ethical and servant leadership — thus suffer from a fatal measurement and conceptual flaw. Rather than being clear behavioural descriptions of what leaders do, these constructs conflate those behaviours with followers’ evaluations of leaders (for example, the leaders’ perceived goodness, past success or value alignment). Across four controlled experiments the authors manipulated either non-behavioural information about a leader (e.g. previous success) or held leader behaviour constant, and then showed that ratings of these positive leadership styles shifted accordingly. That is, even when actual leader behaviour did not vary, the style ratings moved in line with evaluative bias. More importantly, these studies demonstrate that these style-ratings then spuriously predict objective outcomes (for example, donations or lying behaviour) even when no meaningful variation in leader behaviour exists or when manipulation of behaviour is statistically controlled out. That is, the leadership-style measure acts more like a halo or evaluative filter than a valid behavioural metric. The authors conclude that much of the existing evidential literature attributing causal effects to positive leadership styles is therefore suspect, and they call for a radical rethink of how leadership style constructs are conceptualised and measured. The halo effect is basically the “marriage bias” of leadership research: when your followers love you, you can do no wrong — every cough sounds like poetry, every email looks visionary. But when they don’t, suddenly your strategic patience is “indecisiveness,” your confidence is “narcissism,” and your authenticity is just “oversharing.” If you doubt the halo effect, look no further than modern politics: one side sees a courageous truth-teller; the other sees a narcissistic fraud. The main difference is which team’s jersey the leader is wearing. This is why there’s no objective way, let alone much interest, in determining whether Obama is more authentic than Trump or vice-versa: your conclusion is nearly perfectly predicted by your political ideology and affiliation, and it will permeate everything else you believe about the goodness or badness of those characters. Interestingly, a recent meta-analysis shows that effective leaders score significantly higher on impression management, the tendency to adjust and adapt one’s behavior to the specific demands of each situation - think of it as a sort of interpersonal flexibility or social chameleon. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the relationship between impression management and authentic leadership is positive rather than negative. In other words, as it turns out, authentic leaders do not resist external pressures or performative motives; instead, they curate a professional self that matches the demands and expectations of others. As for the other three dimensions of authentic leadership, a closer examination indicates that they are hardly emblematic of what people usually associate with “authenticity”. As I illustrate in my latest book, self-awareness (knowing yourself) is only possible if you pay a great deal of attention to how others see you. In the famous words of Charles Cooley: “I am not who I think I am; I am not who you think I am; I am who I think you think I am”. So, for leaders to truly embody self-awareness, they will have to be much more focused on how they impact others, and how their behavior is perceived or evaluated by others, than on their own introspective or intra-psychical ruminations. This should not be surprising, since it goes hand in hand with impression management. In line, leaders who are more aware of how others see them - and thus violate one of the most famous authenticity mantras, namely “don’t worry about what people think” - are more effective and able to drive higher levels of performance in their teams. Moreover, interpersonal self-awareness (again, knowing and caring about how others see you) is critical for changing and adapting your leadership style, which again goes back to not being rigidly true to yourself, but flexing in the direction of others’ needs. This research is consistent with the finding that the best leaders are versatile and able to broaden their span in order to better adapt to new challenges and avoid becoming a more narrow, limited, or predictable version of themselves. If we turn to the second pillar of authentic leadership, balanced processing (admittedly, not the catchiest or most meaningful term), the cracks deepen. Despite the apparent advantages of measuring this through others’ perceptions (since from a self-report standpoint most people will tell you they are more objective and rational in their thoughts and decisions than they actually are), there is a big difference between how objective, fair, and open-minded a leader appears to be, and actually is. The problem, of course, is that there’s no reliable way to judge that from the outside. Balanced processing is supposed to reflect rational, evidence-based thinking, but the only real way to assess that quality is to measure intelligence — that is, the ability to reason, learn, and make sense of complex information. And while “IQ” has become almost a taboo word in leadership research (because people don’t like what it implies about inequality or talent), it remains by far the most robust predictor of rational decision-making, problem-solving, and sound judgment. Unfortunately, the balanced-processing literature pretends this is something followers can intuit from a leader’s demeanour or tone in meetings. They can’t. What they are really rating is how fair or agreeable the leader feels to them — another form of moral aesthetics, not cognitive ability. Needless to say, intelligence itself offers no immunity against bias or foolishness (we don’t need to look far for examples of very smart people making astonishingly bad decisions), but if we are serious about rationality or objectivity in leadership, intellect (not vibes) is the place to start. Finally, there’s relational transparency — the dimension most directly responsible for authentic leadership’s enduring popularity, and perhaps the only one that actually has anything to do with authenticity (at least semantically speaking). In theory, it describes leaders who are open, genuine, and unafraid to show vulnerability. In practice, it reflects how transparent they appear to others. Since authentic leadership is typically measured through followers’ or peers’ ratings, what counts as “transparency” is simply what audiences perceive as openness. This makes it yet another reputational construct, driven by followers’ preferences, expectations, and cultural scripts rather than by leaders’ actual behaviour. When people rate their leaders as transparent, they’re not conducting an audit of information flow; they’re expressing how much they like, trust, or identify with them. Moreover, while transparency is fashionable, unfiltered honesty is rarely functional in leadership. Leaders who overshare or confuse confession with communication don’t strengthen trust — they undermine it. The reality is that effective leaders disclose strategically, revealing just enough to appear genuine while preserving confidence and authority. In other words, transparency is a performance, and those who perform it well are usually better at managing impressions than at “being themselves.” Once again, what followers experience as authenticity is often just skilful curation —proof that in leadership, as in life, what feels most real is often what’s best rehearsed. At the end of the day, leadership is not a personality seminar or a moral crusade — it is the art and science of building and maintaining high-performing teams. The only thing that ultimately matters is how leaders affect the people around them: how they inspire, coordinate, and direct collective human effort toward shared goals. Everything else — charisma, style, self-disclosure, even moral posturing — is ornamental. So rather than obsessing over whether leaders are “authentic,” we should ask what actually predicts whether they can make teams perform. Decades of research leave little doubt: the most consistent predictors are the Big Five personality traits (especially conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion — and to a lesser degree, emotional stability and agreeableness), intelligence (the ability to learn, reason, and solve problems), technical expertise (knowing what you’re doing), and emotional intelligence, which, despite the name, is less about “being in touch with your feelings” and more about managing impressions — doing almost the opposite of what the authenticity cult prescribes. Effective leaders are rarely those who are brutally honest, self-absorbed, or preoccupied with their own values. Nor are they the ones who “bring their whole selves to work,” since that includes the moody, insecure, and irrelevant parts that others wish had stayed at home. Instead, good leaders do what good actors, diplomats, and therapists do: they regulate themselves for the benefit of others. Even if authentic leadership was conceived with good intentions, it perpetuates the childish, romantic, and ultimately toxic idea that anyone can lead simply by “being themselves.” That may sound liberating, but it’s as naïve as believing that you can become a concert pianist by banging the keys with feeling. Leadership, like music, requires skill, practice, and the ability to perform — not self-expression, but self-control. The irony is that the more obsessed we become with “authenticity,” the further we drift from what leadership actually demands: the capacity to adapt, to manage appearances, and to get the best out of others, even when it means pretending. After all, if “just being yourself” were enough to make people follow you, most families, companies, and nations would be in far better shape than they are.
