Actions are authentic, but are leaders? A reconceptualization of authenticity and leadership practice
批判了基于积极心理学的真实型领导构念，指出其误用了存在主义的真实性概念，并区分了行动的真实性与领导者的真实性，对学者重新审视该领域有启发。
Since the Gallup Leadership Summit, authentic leadership has ascended as a central topic of inquiry owing to practitioners and academicians' desire for more positive types of leadership (Braun & Peus, 2018; Ilies et al., 2005; Luthans & Avolio, 2003; Weiss et al., 2018). Like much of the extant literature, our article centers on authentic leadership as defined and operationalized by Walumbwa et al.'s (2008) four-part framework, which views authentic leaders as individuals who possess high levels of (a) self-awareness, (b) balanced processing, (c) relational transparency, and (d) having an internalized moral perspective. This definition originated from positive psychology and gained popularity, in part, because it offers a morally grounded response for organizations seeking to rebuild confidence, hope, and optimism amid growing corporate and societal problems (e.g., Avolio & Gardner, 2005; Avolio et al., 2004). As a result, scholarly research on authentic leadership has surged (see Gardner et al., 2011, for a review), quickly gaining traction with a wide array of stakeholders who desire leaders that promote behavioral integrity (Leroy et al., 2012), encourage creativity (Semedo et al., 2017), and foster intra-team trust as well as helping behaviors (Hirst et al., 2016). 1 Despite growing interest in authentic leadership, scholars have reviewed and critiqued the construct before raising theoretical and empirical concerns (Einola & Alvesson, 2021; Gardiner, 2015; Sidani & Rowe, 2018). Prior critiques have challenged authentic leadership's contextual grounding, leader-centric ideologies, definitional ambiguity, morality emphasis, and view of a true self (Crawford et al., 2020; Ladkin & Spiller, 2013; Vendette et al., 2022). Further issues raised questions about authentic leadership's unique value over and above other more heavily researched leadership styles (Banks et al., 2016) as well as show the construct's misguided roots in positive psychology (Alvesson & Einola, 2019). With regard to this latter point, the significance of what it means to be authentic originated from the philosophical movement of existentialism, 2 including the works of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, authenticity in a leadership context has been more predominately positioned in positive psychology, gaining popularity along with the positive movement in organizational studies. Indeed, as Iszatt-White and Kempster (2019) have remarked, the authentic leadership construct is entrenched in a “somewhat superficial” and “one-sided” interpretation of authenticity from positive psychology (p. 360). Positive psychology's hold on authenticity is the “antithesis” of existential forms of leadership as its idealized description neglects how authenticity is enacted and discounts the diversity of lived experience (Tomkins & Simpson, 2015, p. 1023). We argue that positive psychology's misinterpretation of existential authenticity not only explains why researchers continue to conflate authentic actions with authentic leaders but also calls into question authentic leadership as a theory and construct more broadly. The abovementioned issues underlie the central purpose of this point-counterpoint discussion, which is to illustrate that authenticity of action is distinct and adds value beyond that of authentic leadership. Despite preceding critiques, to date, scholarly interest in authentic leadership research appears to be accelerating, not stalling. Thus, in an effort to explain why authentic leadership studies will face continued criticism, we retrace authenticity's theoretical foundations to shed light on the conceptual, definitional, and empirical issues stemming from its positive psychology origins. While the critiques of authentic leadership are plentiful and growing, we are the first to show that the authentic leadership construct was handicapped from its inception by opening the proverbial “black box” and uncovering the root of what happened. Our interest in this regard is sparked by Suddaby's (2010) realization that when researchers “cannot agree on or communicate the basic elements of a phenomenon, the accumulation of knowledge cannot occur … and organizational knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented” (pp. 352–353). We thus scrutinize the authentic leadership construct, therein identifying meaningful misdirections in extant work so that our field may advance more useful theory development (e.g., Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021). In doing so, we contribute to the literature by hopefully (a) encouraging scholars to reconsider the blanket use of commonly accepted measures that exist within the authentic leadership arena and (b) stimulating theoretical and methodological advancements for “authentic” leadership research. Ideally speaking, theory and empirical concerns should inform the development of new constructs. This is because construct validity stems from one's ability to express concepts into variables and, in turn, variables into instruments (Suddaby, 2010). Despite 15 years of research, there remains considerable confusion regarding the theoretical meaning that underlies authentic leadership's predominant measure, the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ, see Walumbwa et al., 2008). Such confusion is unfortunate because until researchers clearly define and operationalize the authentic leadership phenomenon, published works will face continued criticism and the knowledge transfer between organizational scientists and practitioners will lose pace. We therefore begin by revisiting the theoretical beginnings of authenticity research in an effort to better understand the evolutionary development of the authentic leadership construct. During the early 20th century, the concept of authenticity and what it means to “live an authentic life” gained considerable interest among existential theorists. 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