This thesis examines the effects of charismatic and transactional leaders’ authenticity in inducing their followers’ voluntary compliance, identification, and obligation. While many studies have been done regarding other kinds of leadership, such ...
This thesis examines the effects of charismatic and transactional leaders’ authenticity in inducing their followers’ voluntary compliance, identification, and obligation. While many studies have been done regarding other kinds of leadership, such as charismatic, transactional, and transformational leadership, scholars began, only recently, to pay attention to the role of leader's authenticity. This study examines how a leader’s authenticity moderates the effects of charismatic and transactional leadership on follower's identification with, compliance to the leader, and perceived legitimacy.
Drawing upon previous studies on authentic leadership, this study derived hypotheses and tested them in scenario-based experimental study. In the study, I conducted two experiments with two sets of scenarios, one is about charismatic leadership and the other is about transactional leadership. Each set in turn consists of four different stories describing high or low charismatic (transactional) leader with high or low authenticity. To test the hypotheses, subjects were given one of those scenarios, and reported their responses to the scenarios. The first study tests the moderation effect of authenticity with the charismatic leader and the second one tests that of transactional leader.137 subjects participated in the first study, and 126 subjects did in the second study.
The manipulation checks showed the predicted effects. First, the high charismatic manipulation showed the mean score (3.67) compared with the mean score (2.48) of the low charismatic manipulation, which was significant (t=-8.96, p < .001). The high transactional leadership condition showed the mean effect (4.01) compared with the mean effect (2.73) of the low condition (t=1.28, p < .001). Finally, the high authenticity condition showed the mean (in charismatic condition; 3.82, in transactional condition; 3.72) of authenticity compared with the mean (in charismatic condition; 2.55, in transactional condition; 2.10) of the low authenticity condition.
The results provide partial support for the hypotheses. As predicted, charismatic leadership increased both identification commitment (b=.630, p <.001) and legitimacy recognition (b=962, p < .001), and decreased compliance commitment (b=-.262, p <.1). However, there is no significant moderation effect of charismatic leadership with authenticity. In the transactional leadership study, transactional leadership did not increased compliance commitment. Authenticity in the transactional leadership study affected follower's attitude in positive way that is, it increased identification commitment (b=1.119, p < .001) and legitimacy recognition (b=1.110, p <.001) and decreased compliance commitment (b=-.371, p <.001). Regarding the moderating effects, authenticity did not moderate the effect of charismatic leadership, but I found strong support for the moderating effect of transactional leadership with authenticity (identification: b=.890, p <.001, compliance: b=.461, p<.1, perceived legitimacy: b=.834, p<.001). I discussed the implications of my thesis in more detail in the discussion section.