Authentic Leadership & Work Engagement

Abstract

The concern here is to understand how in organizations: a) authentic leadership relates to work engagement and psychological ownership, and b) psychological ownership interferes with the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement. Using a correlational research design, the authors collected cross-sectional data from 117 working professionals through a Google Docs based survey in India. They found through regression analyses that authentic leadership indirectly relates to work engagement of employees through the full mediation of organization-based promotive psychological ownership. They discuss the implications for theory and research and argue that authentic leadership theory should include context variables such as control and position power.