Authentic Leadership and Organizational Outcomes: An Integrated Conceptual Framework of Ethical Influence, Psychological Empowerment, and Trust

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.