A Quantitative Study of Authentic Leadership, Authentic Followership, and Organizational Commitment, With Tenure as Moderator
A Quantitative Study of Authentic Leadership, Authentic Followership, and Organizational Commitment, With Tenure as Moderator
Daniel Sharma | 2022
Abstract
Literature has presented that authentic leadership was positively related to organizational commitment. The first problem was validating this positive relationship in another setting. There was no quantitative evidence on authentic followership and its ties to organizational commitment, which formed the second problem. The third problem was limited research on tenure as a moderating variable in the relationship between authentic leadership and organizational commitment. The final problem was the gap on tenure as a moderating variable in the relationship between authentic followership and organizational commitment. These formed the fourfold purpose of the current research. The significance of the present study was to bridge these gaps and add to existing literature. Theoretical framework and literature review established that the authentic leadership variables of self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and balanced processing were positively related to organizational commitment and that tenure provided a moderating effect to these relationships. Authentic followership variables of self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and psychological ownership were theoretically positively related to organizational commitment, again with tenure providing moderation. Age and education were the control variables. The current research quantitatively tested these relationships with post hoc, convenience, and snowball sampling to a geographically dispersed target sample size of 100 participants spread between North America and parts of Oceania. A single, anonymous, voluntary, and noncompensable Google Forms survey reached the target audience, combining questions from the Authentic Leadership Inventory, the Authentic Followership Profile, and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, each reporting their Cronbach’s alpha in the range of .7 to .9. Data analysis was completed using IBM’S SPSS hierarchical multiple regression analysis, where positive relationships between authentic leadership and organizational commitment and between authentic followership and organizational commitment were statistically significant (p < .001). However, tenure’s moderation effects were disproved in this setting. Limitations of this research included nonprobabilistic sampling, uncontrolled variables such as gender, and response bias. Future research could focus on applying the authentic leadership and authentic followership to other contexts, conducting more tests of tenure as a moderating variable, and considering the possibility of how culture or migration might affect how individuals process these concepts.
Keywords: authentic followership, authentic leadership, organizational commitment