2 Authentic leadership

Figure 4 Authentic leadership assumes a human capacity for decency

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This is a photograph of a woman smiling at the camera, her arms crossed at her chest.

Figure 4 Authentic leadership assumes a human capacity for decency

The motivation for developing a theory of authentic leadership was an ethical one – a desire to stop the corporate scandals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and to introduce an alternative leadership that was truer to the human capacity for decency. The theory was an attempt from within the status quo to fix its faults. As with all person-based research, the assumption at play is that the solutions to the world’s problems can be found among (some or many) people already in charge of organisations, as their character is somehow naturally ethical. One cannot be authentically unethical or evil within the theory, because all people are assumed to be ethically good at their core – people who do bad or evil things are simply labelled ‘inauthentic’.