Gender, Authenticity and Leadership

Gender, Authenticity and Leadership examines the conceptual underpinnings of authentic leadership to discover why so little attention has been paid to gender. The author explores the failure to interrogate the complexities surrounding the concept of authenticity, especially as it relates to the diversity of lived experience. Rather than encouraging a genuine approach to leadership, this theory's normative foundation is more likely to encourage social conformity. By contrast, the author shows how Hannah Arendt provides us with a different, ethical lens from which to consider these issues. In the phenomenological investigation into the notion of authentic leadership, the conceptual underpinnings of authenticity are traced back to the Enlightenment and the emergence of bourgeois selfhood. Historically, women's desire to lead was negatively affected by notions of gender propriety, and these societal restrictions serve to perpetuate gender inequities. Thus, the book demonstrates how gender prejudice is embedded in organizational practices, as well as the cultural imagination. As part of this phenomenological inquiry, the author conducts several interviews with senior women leaders in higher education. Their descriptive accounts bring to light diverse ethical tensions regarding personal principles and institutional priorities that serve to complicate gendered notions of authenticity in leadership. Research findings also suggest that it is the self in relation that is fundamental to comprehending what it might mean to lead authentically. When we broaden our definition of what constitutes authentic leadership so as to account for the myriad ways in which we live and lead, we discover how people without positional authority can change their communities in profound ways. Hence, leadership is not dependent upon a person's organizational position, but rather on how their actions demonstrate how much they care for the world. This more expansive context, together with Arendt's insights, opens up new avenues of thinking about the interconnections among gender, authenticity and leadership.