Abstract
Ph.D.
True leadership has always been more difficult to maintain in challenging times, but the unique stressors facing organisations throughout the world today call for renewed attention to what constitutes genuine leadership. There is clearly a need for a better quality of leadership and higher leadership effectiveness, both at an individual and team level, and authentic leadership is often proposed to address these concerns. Much is written about what authentic leadership is, its positive impact, and considerations towards the development of authentic leadership, but little, if any, research is available on scientifically evaluating authentic leadership development interventions. Seeing as literature on leadership authenticity programmes and the evaluation of such programmes still appears to be sparse, it would be worthwhile to find an appropriate and effective leadership authenticity programme that can considerably shorten the development period of true and moral leadership. Unlike previous research on authentic leadership, this research therefore focuses on a practitioner-researcher perspective on developing authentic leadership by means of a leadership authenticity programme.
The theoretical rationale underpinning this research is the notion that leadership authenticity builds trust, and that the development of inter-relational trust and trustworthiness builds and strengthens individual and team leadership effectiveness. This research aims to provide an effective leadership authenticity programme, designed by the researcher, who herself is an authentic leadership development practitioner. This will allow organisations to use a tested methodology, in order to considerably shorten the development time of true and ethical leadership, for the greater good of any organisation and its various stakeholders.
In order to address the research problem, the two main research evaluation objectives were 1) to evaluate: a) the proximal programme effect on leadership authenticity, and b) the distal programme effect on inter-relational trust, and individual and team leadership effectiveness, and 2) to further evaluate how the specific components of this leadership authenticity programme contributed to the development of leadership authenticity, inter-relational trust, and individual and team leadership effectiveness, and to offer a programme theory from this.
A pragmatic mixed-method programme evaluation approach was used in this research. The quantitative aspect in this longitudinal study allowed for pre- and post–programme quantitative data to be used to measure outcome levels and, therefore, the resultant...