What type of LEADER are you?

Are you an Authentic Leader?

The next part to research for the proposed question is what factors of leadership and power are positive? Leadership is a vast body of literature, so let’s focus on the characteristics we find when conducting a search with positive “leadership and power” together, rather than defining leadership per se. It is important to be definitive in this search otherwise the amount of information would be too great to organize. We conduct this search for positive “leadership and power” at the library and find over 100 potential studies for review. After abstract searching, we narrow the articles down to 10.

The Search... We find a positive leader with positive power should have the following characteristics: sense of fairness, emotional stability, open communicator, self-sacrifice, accountability, core self-evaluation, and sense of agreeableness

(see Figure 3)(1).

Figure 3: Characteristics of a positive leader with positive power.

How impressive? After searching and reading, we can conclude two concepts that have a synonymous relationship with structure and negativity can be positive together. Leadership and power together can form a positive relationship to enhance employee engagement.

In fact, this type of leader is associated with a theory called Authentic Leadership. An authentic leader is a positive leader that generates positive outcomes. Authentic leadership is a link to empowerment, power represented in a relationship, and the ability to guide others to accomplish tasks without coercion(2).

No, this means there is literature to back up our ideas – additional support is essential!

Let’s continue with the steps. We are still summarizing and synthesizing.

The summary of the articles read are as follows:

• If the employee has high self-efficacy and the leader is an authentic leader, the greater the success for employee engagement.

• We find work engagement is defined as vigor, dedication, and absorption.

• We find employee engagement is defined as being extroverted and emotionally stable.

• High moral leaders have high moral followers.

• If the leader is ethical, the leader will have ethical followers.

So What?

These articles help us solve the problem whether the concept of leadership and power can exist together. We can say yes, there is some evidence supporting this dual relationship. We find leadership and power can represent the push-pull relationship of self-development and the corporate-self.

This second synthesis of evidence provides the practitioner with information as follows:

“Leadership and Power” together can postulate a relationship that

can satisfy self-growth and organizational growth. This can be done

through the characteristics listed in Figure 3.

Since we have established this relationship, we can start to apply it to employee engagement. How do we increase employee engagement with the help of leadership and power?

In the final segment, I will discuss my findings on the overarching question and how I finalize the synthesis into items that make practical sense for practitioners.

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(1) Bunderson, J. S., & Reagans, R. E. (2011). Power, status, and learning in organizations. Organization Science, 22(5), 1182-1194. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0590

(2) Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315-338. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001

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Series 1, Post 3 of 4