Imagine a creative way to improve productivity, increase employee commitment, and reduce turnover – without having to spend any extra money? According to a recent article in Forbes magazine (Conerly, 2018), the cost of employee turnover is 50 percent of entry-level employees’ salaries and 200 percent for senior executives’ salaries a year. Reducing turnover could give your company a big competitive boost.
Recent studies (Drakeley, 2018; Laing & Jones, 2016) shed light on how leadership styles can impact employee outcomes, especially with reference to employee wellbeing and commitment. In fact, supportive leadership and trust from authentic leaders are some of the most important leadership behaviors that can improve wellbeing in the workplace because of how the traits help employees build self-esteem and increase their affective commitment. This means that if corporate executives in the C Suite could find a way to improve employee performance, while improving their employees’ quality of life in the workplace, wouldn’t both shareholders and employees be satisfied?
What is Authentic Leadership?
Authentic Leadership is a style of leadership that provides leaders a toolbox or backpack of behavioral traits that they can use in different situations. Similar to skiing with a backpack, you pull out the necessary tools to deal with the conditions at hand. For example, if the weather turns spring-like, you grab wax for your skis to quicken up the skis in the slower, sticky snow. If a blizzard hits, you grab your goggles to trade out with your sunglasses. And, if you run out of energy, a quick snack or drink of water can give you more punch for another bump run.
Authentic Leadership provides a backpack of behavioral traits to use in the workplace with employees in different conditions. If an employee is stressed out about a looming deadline, authentic leaders can use their positive support behavior to improve the employee’s resilience and wellbeing. If an employee is feeling like they are being overworked unfairly, authentic leaders can use their support to show that physical suffering can provide not only pain, but possibilities (Easton & Krippner, 1964; Frankl, 1946). Kouzes and Posner (2006) suggest that leaders can embrace the employee’s suffering as a sign of “passion,” which shows the leaders’ “compassion” for the employee’s hard work ethic. Similar to authentic leadership’s positive support trait, is their fairness trait. Both are equally important, but more so in different situations. For example, if an employee feels that certain policies are unfair, an authentic leader can provide transparency to why the policies were enacted, can listen and try to understand the employee’s concerns, and can seek buy-in for changes, if needed, to the policies.
Authentic Leaders’ Two Traits: Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation Create a Positive and Ethical Organizational Climate
Authentic leaders’ two traits, self-awareness and self-regulation, empower the leader to impact their employees in a positive way. Authentic leaders’ self-awareness creates a positive environment because leaders are continually searching for ways to improve by evaluating themselves and their purpose in life and work. This self-evaluation provides positive modeling to employees by creating a caring, positive, strength-based climate (Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, May, & Walumbwa, F. (2005). Authentic leaders’ sense of fairness comes from their self-regulation. This includes equal processing of information, internalized regulation, transparency, and authenticity based on the leaders’ core beliefs and values (Gardner, et al., 2005). This authentic behavior in leaders effects employees beneficially, developing and preserving a positive and ethical organizational climate. (Gardner, et al., 2005).
Previous studies have linked higher levels of leader authenticity to higher resilience and self-confidence in themselves (Kernis, 2003), which, in turn, has restored self-confidence and resiliency in employees by helping them search for a purpose and meaning (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). More recently, the leadership trait, authenticity, has been analyzed with empirical results pointing to how authentic leaders shield employees from interpersonal conflict and its destructive effects (Wenzel & Lucas-Thompson, 2012; Wickham, Williamson, Beard, Kobayashi, & Hirst, 2016). And because employees trust authentic leaders to help them develop in the workplace (Shapira-Lishchinsky & Levy-Gazenfrantz, 2016), their wellbeing and confidence rise.
How Authentic Leaders Impact Your Company’s Bottom Line – with a Shift in Your Company’s Environment
You may ask, “Why worry about positive support and fairness when profits and results are the goals of most shareholders?” Profits and results are tantamount to an organization’s success, but do they have to be the only objectives? Paradoxically, authentic leadership’s positive support, compassion, fairness, and transparency can result in higher profits and results because authentic leadership can produce higher productivity in employees, increased commitment, and reduced turnover. For example, an authentic leader can demand results, but at the same time, can listen to the team, focus on employees’ strengths, while helping with their weaknesses. In addition, authentic leaders can be transparent with the goals of the company and why the first quarter’s results this year are more important than last year’s – due to a new competitor, or a changed regulation. This transparency could bring purpose and meaning to a push for harder and smarter work.
References
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.
Conerly, B. (2018). Companies need to know the dollar cost of employee turnover. Forbes, retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2018/08/12/companies-need-to-know-the-dollar-cost-of-employee-turnover/#101ce79ad590
Drakeley, C. (2018). Follower commitment: The impact of authentic leadership’s positivity and justice on presenteeism. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/
Easton, H., & Krippner, S. (1964). Disability, rehabilitee, and existentialism, Personnel and Guidance Journal, 43(3), 230-234.
Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s search for meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., May, D. R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005). “Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 343-372.
Kernis, M. H. (2003). Toward a conceptualization of optimal self-esteem. Psychological Inquiry, 14(1), 1-26.
Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (2006). A leader’s legacy. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Laing, S. S., & Jones, S. M. W. (2016). Anxiety and depression mediate the relationship between perceived workplace health, support, and presenteeism: A cross-sectional analysis. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 58(11), 1144-1149.
Shapira-Lishchinsky, O., & Levy-Gazenfrantz, T. (2016). The multifaceted nature of mentors’ authentic leadership and mentees’ emotional intelligence: A critical perspective. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 44(6), 951-969.
Wenzel, A. J., & Lucas-Thompson, R. G. (2012). Authenticity in college-aged males and females, how close others are perceived, and mental health outcomes. Sex Roles, 67(5-6), 334-350.
Wickham, R. E., Williamson, R. E., Beard, C. L., Kobayashi, C. L. B., & Hirst, T. W. (2016). Authenticity attenuates the negative effects of interpersonal conflict on daily well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 60, 56-62.