Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering What it Means to be Authentic

Although popular, authentic leadership has drawn several criticisms regarding its validity and underlying assumptions from critical leadership theorists. We offer an existential critique of authentic leadership, which challenges the dominant narrative constructed by positive psychologists and contemporary management researchers. Our critique leverages the philosophical underpinnings of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Sartre, and Heidegger to illuminate how contemporary researchers have misappropriated the Self and authentic leadership. We argue that contemporary approaches to authentic leadership misuse the philosophical concept of the Self and the Other on which authenticity is built by converging them into a single Being, de facto, creating an inauthentic representation of authenticity itself – and authentic leaders. Our approach uses a living story lens where authenticity is not an explicit condition, but rather emerges as leaders make strategic decisions that move them towards, or away from, pure authenticity. To overcome the dominant narrative in contemporary research, we offer critical management theorists’ new opportunities to continue authentic leadership’s epistemological, ontological, and existential development.