“What's your story?” A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development

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Abstract

In this paper, we first develop the concepts of authentic leaders, authentic leadership, and authentic leader development. We suggest a definition of authentic leaders, which is based on the leader's self-concept: his or her self-knowledge, self-concept clarity, self-concordance, and person-role merger, and on the extent to which the leader's self-concept is expressed in his or her behavior. Following, we offer a life-story approach to the development of authentic leaders. We argue that authentic leadership rests heavily on the self-relevant meanings the leader attaches to his or her life experiences, and these meanings are captured in the leader's life-story. We suggest that self-knowledge, self-concept clarity, and person-role merger are derived from the life-story. Therefore, the construction of a life-story is a major element in the development of authentic leaders. We further argue that the life-story provides followers with a major source of information on which to base their judgments about the leader's authenticity. We conclude by drawing some practical implications from this approach and presenting suggestions for further research.

Section snippets

Authentic leaders and authentic leadership—clarification of terms

We believe that in order for the term authentic leadership to have an added value and be useful, it has to be different than other terms commonly used in the leadership literature. In this regard, definitions that encompass positive leadership qualities that are not directly related to the term authenticity, e.g. developing the leader's associates, or are covered by other leadership concepts, e.g. transformational leadership, may be too broad and non-distinctive to be useful. To be distinctive

Life-stories as a source of self-knowledge and self-concept clarity

We defined authentic leaders as having, among other things, self-knowledge and self-concept clarity. Our thesis is that they achieve such knowledge and clarity through the development of a life-story.

Self-knowledge consists, first of all, of the answers the person gives himself or herself to the question “Who am I?” According to the “narrative mode of knowing” (Bruner, 1986), these answers are often organized in the form of life-stories. Life-stories express the storytellers' identities, which

Assisting the development of authentic leaders from the life-story approach

The life-story approach to authentic leader development suggests that self-knowledge, self-concept clarity, and the internalization of the leader's role into the self-concept are achieved through the construction of life-stories. In this regard, it is different from most leadership development programs, which tend to focus on the acquisition of concepts, skills, and behaviors either in courses and workshops (Conger, 1992) or through on-the-job experiences, mentoring and coaching (Day, 2000). In

Research implications

Our arguments here are largely speculative though they draw on previous research (e.g., Bennis & Thomas, 2002, Gardner, 1995, Shamir et al., 2005, Tichy, 1997). Research on leadership from a life-story point of view is still scarce in general, and virtually non-existent with respect to the topic of authentic leadership development. Both the explicit arguments and the implied propositions presented in this paper need to be substantiated and tested.

In contrast with previous biographical studies

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