Western CEDAR

Influences of Authentic Leadership Styles and Challenges to Enduring Pervasive Leadership Models

Miller Hall

Cultural diversity is becoming increasingly apparent in an era of heightened globalization. As a result, identifying inclusive culturally diverse leadership paradigms is of the utmost importance for the improvement and success of current and future organizations and institutions. Authentic leadership is an emerging paradigm that highlights the dynamic interaction between leader cultural lifeways, identity, leader-follower relationships, and context. Authentic leadership emphasizes communal, transparent relationships between leader and follower which could help organizations thrive in increasingly heterogenous contexts. While this communal emphasis has been prevalent in Eastern leadership and among indigenous populations for centuries, it sharply contrasts with traditional paradigms of Western Eurocentric leadership styles which privilege the dominant and seemingly omnipresent alpha male leader. However, with the rise in popularity and interest in more transformative leadership styles in recent years, Western Eurocentric thoughts about leadership appear to be shifting away from this alpha male style, especially among young people. Consequently, research is needed to identify communal leaders, authentic leaders in particular, and how they are perceived by contemporary American citizens. Factors such as the perceived likeability and competence of leaders and the personality characteristics of followers can influence the way in which people respond to different styles of leadership. An online survey study using an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample was conducted to investigate people’s perceptions of different existing leadership styles ranging from highly hierarchical to highly communal. Three separate leadership profiles were created to represent authentic leadership, alpha male leadership, and Daoist leadership respectively. Participants were asked to rate each hypothetical leader on various characteristics associated with hierarchical and communal leadership styles. Additionally, we examined participants’ ratings of each leader’s likeability and competence and asked them to rate the leaders in order from most preferred to least preferred. Finally, we included a measure of social dominance orientation to determine how preferences for inter-group hierarchy influence perceptions of leaders. The preliminary results indicate that likeable leaders are generally preferred, regardless of their level of competence. Furthermore, participants who were higher in social dominance orientation tended to rate more communal leaders as less competent than the alpha male leader. This has implications for the potential success of authentic leaders in diverse cultural settings. However, their effectiveness may be associated with followers’ level of social dominance orientation.