International Journal of Management and Sustainability Practices

Amid a rising tide of unethical organizational behavior and declining employee confidence in management's integrity, Authentic Leadership (AL) is now being studied as a theoretical construct that could support ethically driven leadership focused on employees' identities. Although scholars are increasingly interested in this area, there remains a significant lack of understanding of how AL leads to positive organizational outcomes. This conceptual paper proposes a new comprehensive framework that links AL which includes characteristics such as self-awareness, relationship transparency, balanced processing, and internalization of a moral perspective with four organizational outcome measures (employee job satisfaction, employee work engagement, employee Organizational Citizenship Behaviour [OCB], and employee well-being), and links both to two mediation variables: psychological empowerment (PE) and Trust In Leadership (TL). Further, the proposed framework introduces organizational culture and employee personality as theoretically motivated moderator variables. Based on theories including Self-Determination Theory, Social Learning Theory, Positive Psychology, and Person-Environment Fit Theory, this model offers six formally stated propositions and responds to recent calls for process-based authentic leadership theorising.

The abrupt transition to remote and hybrid work has fundamentally changed the boundaries of work-life in highly tech-based sectors such as Information Technology (IT). While remote work is marketed to be a flexible and empowering solution for women, the recent research indicates that there are complex and gendered impacts of remote work on women professionals. The review examines the latest literature (2023-2025) to understand the question of work-life integration of women in the IT sector in the transition to remote work. Based on the theoretical frameworks such as the Boundary Theory, the Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, the review identifies five emerging trends, including the flexibility-intensification paradox, the persistence of a gendered division of unpaid work, the blurring of boundaries and technostress, the well-being-performance paradox, and the failure of gender-neutral remote work policies. The findings suggest that remote work does not necessarily reduce work-life conflict; rather, in the absence of policies to reduce it at an institutional level in terms of workload management, right-to-disconnect norms, and gender-biased HR policies, remote work has the potential to reinforce structural inequalities. The review expands the argument that work-life "mix" for women in IT is not an individual coping strategy but an organisational and a socio-cultural issue. This paper synthesises disjointed empirical evidence to propose the need for structural rethinking of remote work design in sustainable, gender-sensitive integration practices in digital workplaces.