UTS21440 Chap.12 Positive and Authentic Leadership
Positive and Authentic Leadership
Week 10 of 21440 Management Skills at University of Technology Sydney runs two leadership theories side by side.
Positive leadership is presented as a reaction against approaches that focus on fixing problems and maintaining the status quo, and is operationalised as four practices: cultivating a positive climate, building positive relationships, fostering positive communication and enhancing positive meaning.
Authentic leadership is a theory about the leader's relationship to themselves, built as a six step journey beginning with a life story. Both explicitly deny that the capability is inborn, and both make self awareness the entry condition, which is why they share a teaching week.
What this chapter covers
- 01
What positive leadership reacts against, and positive deviance as its key characteristic
- 02
Four positive practices, and what each one means
- 03
Positive energisers, and the two part leadership task
- 04
How far a mood travels, and the share of team climate attributed to a leader
- 05
The reported communication ratio in high and low performing organisations
- 06
Active constructive communication, and the event rather than the person
- 07
Five stated characteristics of an authentic leader
- 08
The claim that no universal leadership traits are required
- 09
The six step journey, from life story to integration
- 10
Principles as values translated into action
- 11
The four dimension questionnaire, its items and its published bands
Separating the two leadership theories, then showing where they meet
- +1Different objects. Positive leadership is a theory about the climate a leader creates, since its four practices all concern the environment around the team and its evidence is about mood contagion, communication ratios and performance. Authentic leadership is a theory about the leader's relationship to themselves.
- +1Different failure modes. A positive leader can fail by producing a warm climate with no substance behind it. An authentic leader can fail by being entirely consistent with themselves while producing a climate nobody wants to work in.
- +1Where they meet, first: self awareness. The authentic account calls it the most recommended capability and names denial as the obstacle, and the positive account requires a leader to know which of their own behaviours energise other people, which cannot be assessed from the inside.
- +1Where they meet, second: learnability. Both deny that the capability is inborn. One states that positive energy results from learnable behaviours, the other reports that leaders need no universal traits, and that shared claim is what makes both teachable.
Key terms
- Positive leadership
- An approach that sets out to draw the best from people and to move them toward the remarkable, taken from positive organisational scholarship, and presented against approaches focused on fixing problems or maintaining the status quo.
- Positive climate
- The first of four positive practices: a setting in which the balance of what people feel at work tips positive rather than negative, and in which care for them is genuine, which is said to motivate people to do their best work.
- Positive communication
- The third of four positive practices, using language that affirms, supports and includes in place of language that criticises and shuts out, and measured in the research by a ratio of positive to negative comments.
- Active constructive communication
- Showing interest and enthusiasm while a team member is speaking, and keeping the conversation pointed at a solution, with critical feedback delivered by focusing on the event rather than on the person.
- Authentic leadership
- A theory describing leaders who demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practise their values consistently, bring the heart to the work as well as the head, build relationships that are lasting and that matter, and hold the self discipline needed to deliver a result.
- Life story
- The starting point of the authentic leadership journey. Most authentic leaders described stories involving overcoming difficult experiences and reframed those events rather than seeing themselves as victims.
- Leadership principles
- Values translated into action. The article notes that values derive from beliefs and convictions but that you do not know your true values until they are tested under pressure.
- Balanced processing
- One of four dimensions of the authentic leadership questionnaire, measured by four of its sixteen items, alongside self awareness, internalized moral perspective and relational transparency.
- Relational transparency
- The dimension of the questionnaire concerned with whether people encounter the real version of a leader rather than a presented one.
Positive and Authentic Leadership FAQ
What is positive deviance?
Aiming at the exceptional, being willing to cut against the grain, and hunting for solutions that a problem focused or deficit focused reading cannot reach, with results that far exceed expectations. It is the same second approach that positive organisational scholarship contributed in Week 2, restated here as a leadership behaviour rather than as a research stance.
How should I cite the figure about a leader and team climate?
With its qualifier intact. The source gives it as up to a share of climate, and climate is a perceptual measure, so it is an upper bound on an attribution rather than a measured causal effect on output. The accompanying claim about performance is also given as an upper bound. Cited carefully the point still stands, since whatever the exact share it is far larger than any other social influence listed.
Does the communication ratio mean I should never criticise?
No. The measure is a ratio of positive to negative comments across an organisation, and the highest performing organisations maintained a substantial majority of positive comments while the poorest reversed it. The practice that accompanies it is explicit that even critical feedback can nurture a relationship, provided it focuses on the event rather than on the person.
Is authentic leadership about being born a certain way?
The opposite. The largest study of its kind reported that nobody has to be born carrying some universal set of leader characteristics or traits, and the parallel chapter on positively energising leadership states that positive energy is not a personality dimension or inherent attribute but results from behaviours anyone can learn and develop.
Should I put my questionnaire score in a journal entry?
No. Both instruments are pre class activities and the results are personal information. The reflective work lies in what an item made you notice, not in the number, and the same rule applied to the strengths survey earlier in the subject. A marker is reading for insight either way.
Assessment move
Keep the two theories separate by object and by failure mode, because merging them is the most common error in this week's writing and the distinction takes one sentence each.
Learn the four practices and the six journey steps as lists you can name, then spend your remaining time on the joins, since self awareness and learnability are what the two theories share and a paragraph that states the join outperforms a page that describes both accurately.
Read the set chapter itself for its table of attributes and watch the webinar presentations, because three of the four reading questions depend on material no summary can substitute for.
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