Download Proceedings of European Business Research Conference

Proceedings of European Business Research Conference
Sheraton Roma, Rome, Italy, 5 - 6 September 2013, ISBN: 978-1-922069-29-0
What Types of Extra-Role Behaviors Do Authentic
Leaders Promote?
Filotheos Ntalianis
Authentic leadership refers to the extent to which a leader acts with
high ethical and moral standards (i.e. internalized moral
perspective), stemming from the fact that he/she acknowledges
his/her own strengths, motives and limitations (i.e. self-awareness),
and is open-minded in analyzing and accepting informational cues
from others (i.e. balanced processing), promoting transparency
and information exchange with subordinates (i.e. relational
transparency). Recent research links authentic leadership with inand extra-role behaviors, job satisfaction, commitment, trust in
management and employee engagement. The main focus of this
study was to expand these findings and further explore the
relationship between authentic leadership and extra-role behaviors,
namely organizational citizenship behavior, prosocial behavior,
voice behavior and whistle blowing. Data were gathered through
an electronic questionnaire from 189 employees working in
different companies. Bivariate correlations indicated a link between
authentic leadership and all outcome variables of this study. In
regression analyses, the strongest relationship was between
authentic leadership and prosocial behavior and the weakest with
organizational citizenship behavior. In contrast to the proposed
hypothesis a negative but insignificant relationship was found for
whistle blowing. Limitations refer primarily to the snowball sampling
technique that was used for data collection and secondarily to
common method variance issues, as data were collected only from
one source, subordinates. Given the fact a relationship could not
be established between authentic leadership and whistle blowing,
additional research is warranted to re-examine this link. In addition,
future research endeavors should focus on contextual variables
(e.g. organizational culture, company climate, job characteristics)
as well as individual variables (e.g. motivation, personality) and
how these interact with authentic leadership to deepen further our
understanding of subordinates’ extra-role behaviors. Finally,
practitioners should develop all four aspects of authentic
leadership through training, including case studies and on-the-job
assignments.
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Filotheos Ntalianis, Department of Business Administration, University of Piraeus,
Karaoli & Dimitriou 80, Piraeus, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]