WEI Feng

Professor of Tongji SEM, Doctoral Supervisor

Recently, the concept of authenticity has been popular in Leadership Studies, which was translated into Chinese as “forthrightness and sincerity (率真)” by Harvard Business Review. In my opinion, the down-to-earth Chinese translation vividly depicts a good leader whose words and deeds fully align with his heart, and who keeps a sincere and transparent relationship with his or her subordinates. A series of researches have shown that: authentic leadership is profoundly beneficial as it effectively improves followers’ satisfaction, engagement, trust in the leader, commitment to the organization, task performance and so on.

The reality, however, is totally different. On the one hand, authentic leaders are rarely seen while pretending and high-handed leaders are quite common in the workplace. On another, many Chinese classics underlined the necessity of shrewdness in leaders. Sayings like “compassion does not help in enhancing authority and kindness does not make a good leader”, “one should only tell 30% of his real thoughts and can never speak from the bottom of his or her heart”, and “out of the mouth comes disaster” remain the bible for many people. For this reason, we cannot help but wondering: Which exactly should a leader choose, disguise or authenticity?

Authentic leaders have a clear idea about what their beliefs and values are, thus act accordingly by carrying out open communication with their followers without pretending to be someone else. When leading the followers, they often set themselves as examples and role models instead of using forceful coercion. It is believed that such leading pattern with positive guidance helps form a healthy leader-follower relationship but its impact on productivity remains unclear. As is shown by the example that Herminia Ibarra put forward in her The Authenticity Paradox, leaders’ authority immediately fades away when they believe in transparency and collaboration and tell their followers about their fear and unsureness in management work and ask for help.

Theories of Leadership Studies has been following two routes, one being studies of leading style or behavior, the other being studies of leaders’ competency. The former has produced may well-known theories like Charismatic Leadership, Transactional Leadership, Participative Leadership and Ethical Leadership. The latter has been relatively simple in theory but quite productive in practice as a number of large companies are promoting leader competency model design, leader competency evaluation and leadership development, and have thus effectively optimized their team abilities and improved their organizational performance. Overall, the two studies are developing in parallel with each other.

In my view, the supportive authentic leadership only works as a boost for both relationship and task performance when the leader is exceptionally competent. Otherwise, simple authenticity could harm a leader’s authority and turn the leader-follower relationship into a harmonious but unproductive one. Based on this, we carried out a research to study authentic leadership’s dependence on competency, that is, whether or not authentic leadership takes effect only when a leader’s competency is high.

We distributed questionnaires to 320 pairs of subordinates and their supervisors in Shanghai. After analyzing the data from a total of 248 supervisor-subordinate valid dyads, we found that our prediction was right. We used task performance, relationship performance and work engagement as dependent variables, and similar results appeared. The results of our study are shown in the following picture.

The implications are:

1. Leaders should act as what they think and stick to their beliefs without any disguise. Our study found that leader’s authenticity may improve followers’ job performance and work engagement. Since an authentic leader does not act as a “perfect leader” by pretending to know everything or hiding his or her weaknesses, he or she often choose to speak franking and sincerely in order to carry out cognitive and emotional communication with others. In this way, the subordinates, as their sense of self-esteem are enhanced, tend to put down unnecessary burdens when working with their leader and do their work with peaceful minds. It also helps to guide leaders to recognize their vulnerabilities and communicate with other in their true colors, thus reducing the cost of communication. In the meanwhile, authentic leaders are also inclined to help their followers grow faster by delivering clear expectations, effective encouragement and creating development opportunities. These practices are also in line with President Xi’s emphasis on the diligence and pragmatism of cadres.

2. Leaders should focus on improving their competency, that is, recognizable individual working behaviors that affect the organizational effectiveness. Usually taking the form of skills and abilities, competency is often shown in a leader’s goal setting, problem awareness, decision making, planning, work guiding, authorization, coordination, supervision, motivation and team management. The above have a positive and significant influence on the work performance of both the leader him or herself and the subordinates. As is proved by this study, just like their authenticity, leaders’ competency also helps improve subordinates’ work performance and engagement.

3. Under the premise of remarkable competency, leaders do not have to disguise. Our study found that, theoretically, authenticity and competency both contribute to the promotion of leading effectiveness. However, comprehensively speaking, authenticity relies on a leader’s competency to take effect. When a leader’s competency is remarkable, authenticity reduces transaction cost, thus playing an active role; Otherwise, authenticity does not help the situation at all and could even do some harms including lowering the leader’s authority. This implication happens to confirm the theory of Pratfall Effect in Psychology, which says that a person who accidentally makes a mistake tend to be more popular under the premise that he or she is perceived as nearly perfect.

An Economist at Cornell University named Robert Frank wrote that, the fear of being manipulated is so common that we often speculate on others with the worst malevolence, which in turn brings out the ugliest part of us. That is, in order not to be fooled, we reluctantly ignore the fact that we are actually nobler. In reality, nobody wants to disguise, because such behavior consumes a lot of energy. However, due to the lack of trust in our own ability and goodwill of others, we usually automatically seek this improper impression management strategy, which might take effect within a certain time and range. Nonetheless, I have to tell those competent leaders that “you will sure become even better when you put down your disguise and stay true to yourself”.