Understanding Authentic Leadership and Employee’s Work Engagement

Being a fundamental component of organizational culture, leadership has a significant impact and studies have paid close attention to its influence on employees in terms of performance and engagement. In recent years, the importance of authentic leadership has grown in the literature. This study takes an employee-centered approach in order to understand the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement in an IT company using the Authentic Leadership Inventory (Neider & Schriesheim, 2011) and the 9-item version of Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2006) administered on a sample of 111 (59 males and 52 females) IT employees. The results showed that there exists a positive correlation between authentic leadership and employee work engagement significant at p < .01, implying that Work engagement, defined as employees having a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption, is significantly influenced by authentic leaders who exhibit traits like self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective.