These rationales revolved around five themes: Emotional labour as integral to leader role: Managers saw the management of their emotions, in the form of emotional labour, as integral to their professional expectations of what it means to be a leader. Managing emotions as an explicit part of being authentic: Managers articulated a sense of authenticity through the achievement of long-term goals to which they were committed, rather than through being relationally transparent in the moment. Emotional labour is necessary to the fulfilment of values and beliefs: Managers made a clear connection between feeling authentic and fulfilling their values and beliefs, with this connection holding good even when they were required to perform emotional labour. Managing emotions for the benefit of others: The most frequently mentioned rationale for performing emotional labour was for the benefit of others, both in terms of subsuming their own emotional issues to the needs of their staff, and in terms of a broader awareness of the need to positively affirm others through their interactions and behaviours. Managing emotions to protect themselves: In a small number of cases, managers expressed the need to manage their emotions in order to protect themselves, as a last-ditch response to specific, toxic situations. BEING AUTHENTICALLY INAUTHENTIC? What emerged was a degree of disconnect between the experience of personal authenticity and the actions/interactions needed for managers to lead effectively. The underlying values and goals to which managers felt committed served to supplant relational transparency as a key underpinning of authenticity and to frame emotional labour as both integral to their leadership role and beneficial to colleagues and the organisation. This complex pattern of combined authenticity and inauthenticity suggested three key tensions in the way managers construct their ideas of authenticity: Who managers feel they should be rather than who they are: This tension relates to howmanagers serve as role model professionals, and articulate their sense of how they should present themselves as leaders. The connection here between how they should be and who they should be – and hence what an ‘authentic leader’ should look like – is evident, as is the sense that these internalised expectations no longer give rise to feelings of inauthenticity. Thus, authenticity is seen as bounded or circumscribed by the expectations of the role or situation to which it pertains and underpinned by the duty of professionalism in interactions with others. What managers were true to rather than who: This tension relates to managers’ underpinning values as key drivers of action. The achievement of internalised, value-congruent goals was a strong driver for all managers in our study, expressed as an integral part of being true to oneself. Thus ‘playing the long game’ to achieve valued goals was constructed as a deeper form of authenticity than transparently showing what you are feeling in the moment: it was the sense that your ‘true self’ was reflected in the goals to which you aspired and your commitment to bringing them to fruition. Being the same self over time and across situations: This tension relates to the importance of consistency, where showing the same self in different situations, no matter what was going on personally, is seen as more important than sharing your every emotion as a marker of authenticity. The concern for consistency is thus articulated as authentic even though it involves the emotional labour of masking certain feelings. Here, authenticity is constructed as a recognisable ‘you’ that others can rely on to be the same each time you interact. Collectively, these tensions suggest a fundamental paradox underpinning managers’ understanding of authenticity. The paradox arises from managers’ routine acceptance of emotional labour (i.e. a form of inauthenticity) as a means of enacting values-driven leadership (i.e. being true to themselves, or authentic), such that authentic leadership requires them to be inauthentic. This suggests that ‘authenticity’ is implicitly situated and subjective rather than universal and absolute: about being true to the self, yes, but a more fluid and contingent self than we might usually understand. That this implicit inauthenticity did not, in practice, provoke feelings of being inauthentic – that instead it was subsumed into managers’ experiences of being an authentic leader – speaks to the need for a more complex, nuanced understanding of authenticity in leadership than the current AL construct is capable of offering. This understanding needs to embrace rather than deny authenticity’s inextricable symbiosis with inauthenticity, and accept not only that not all inauthenticity is bad but also that it may be in moments of intentional inauthenticity that we are most aware of the whole authenticity project. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 29 The clamour for leaders to be authentic – and the perception of authentic leadership as a panacea for a range of organisational ills – is widely heard in both academic literature and popularmedia. Yet authentic leadership (AL) – at least as defined by academics – remains deeply problematic. Using the requirement tomanage our emotions at work as a lens, our research has explored the tensions inherent in AL and their paradoxical implications for practicing leaders. Our study revealed how practising leaders are able to feel authentic even as they manage their emotions as a routine tool of accomplishing their leadership role. This apparent disconnect between experiencing authenticity and the actions/interactions in which this experience is embedded raises profound questions concerning authenticity – and particularly relational transparency as a core aspect of authenticity – in the daily practice of leadership. Authentic Leadership was developed with the aim of restoring the faith in leadership lost as a result of the ‘ethical corporate meltdown’ resulting from its ‘transformational’ and ‘charismatic’ predecessors. The intention was to delineate a style of leadership capable of producing positive organisational outcomes through leaders who are transparent about their intentions and who maintain a seamless link between their espoused values, behaviours and actions. More simply, authenticity involves acting in accordance with one’s ‘true self’ and hence expressing oneself in ways that are consistent with inner thoughts and feelings. For anyone who has been privy to confidential information (concerning acquisitions, reorganisations, redundancies, or a host of other commercially or individually sensitive activities), this idea of relational transparency can immediately be seen as problematic. The basic cultural idea of managers as ‘rational decision-makers’ and the inappropriateness of bringing one’s personal problems – and hence emotions – to work, also runs counter to this seemingly simple and laudable idea. My colleagues and I considered the performance of emotional labour – that is, the requirement to manage our emotions as a tool of enacting our leadership roles – to explore just how feasible relational transparency might be as a component of authenticity in leadership. Our findings were potentially shocking – if not entirely surprising. PRACTICAL CHALLENGES TO AUTHENTICITY – AND HOW MANAGERS LIVEWITH THEMK Our study identified a number of ‘rationales’ through which practising leaders could articulate feelings of authenticity even as they regulated their emotions as a routine tool of their leadership role. As an erstwhilemanager within the corporate spheremyself, these rationales had considerable personal resonance in reflecting the reality of balancing commercial necessity with personal integrity. 28 | Dr Marian Iszatt-White is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy, with a research focus on leadership as emotional labour and authentic leadership. This article is based in part on the article Impossible or just irrelevant?: Unravelling the ‘authentic leadership’ paradox through the lens of emotional labour, by Dr Marian Iszatt White, Professor Valerie Stead and Dr Carole Elliott, published in the journal Leadership. m.iszattwhite@lancaster.ac.uk My colleagues and I considered the performance of emotional labour – that is, the requirement to manage our emotions as a tool of enacting our leadership roles – to explore just how feasible relational transparency might be as a component of authenticity in leadership. ‘‘ ’’
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