Authentic Leaders

For gaining competitive advantage in today's dynamic work environment creativity is a treasured source. Organizations have to advance creativity with an aim to endure and flourish along with ever- advancing technology, extreme internal and global competitive pressures, vague and very much stormy economic environment. Organizations also need to discover creative approaches to accomplish their own requirements. Organizations need leaders who can provoke positive behavior in their employees by motivating them. These behaviors are not necessarily part of their job requirement officially but they play a vital role in giving productive outcomes in organizations.

In today's world organizations are much more focused on helping employees/workers to enhance job performance rather than controlling and dominating them. According to Brungardt a constant research concern in the field of human resource expansion, management and managerial performance is Leadership. Leadership is one of the major relative factors that impacts creativity and innovation. Leaders play a decisive part in empowering and sustaining the development and nurturing of creativity and innovation. The development of a warm relationship between leader and employee is very much important to promote a healthy organizational environment. Among different styles of leadership, authentic leadership has gained much attention owing to paradigm change due to some incidents in different organizations. Leaders help followers find association and meaning at their workplace, thereby making an essential difference to organizations and in this context Authentic leadership has drawn significant attention. For a better understanding of the association between advanced leadership styles, for instance authentic leadership and creativity, there is a great need of further investigation. Various researchers and practitioners have explored the effects of authentic leadership on employee behaviors and conducts to improve organizational performance.

By making creativity a pre-requisite condition for any job, employee creativity can be reinforced by leaders. Creativity can also be improved by showing positive response and rewards to employees when they accomplish creative outcomes. Motivated employees exhibit elevated levels of creativity.

In contrast some studies in the literature validate that employee creativity may decline under leadership and supervision. Leader's close observing attitude and narrow administration turn down the employee's creativity. The contradictory outcomes motivated the research to figure out the effects of leadership (authentic leadership) on employee's creativity. In literature, different mediating variables such as hope, positive effect, and psychological capital have been tested between the association of authentic leadership and employee creativity. This research is one of the pioneer studies to explore the mediating effect of work engagement and psychological empowerment on the relationship of authentic leadership and employee creativity.

Semedo, Coelho and Ribeiro explored the relationship between authentic leadership and creativity, with the mediating role of happiness. Further they recommended that more investigations should be carried out to recognize additional consequences of the presence of authentic leaders in organizations plus suggested other variables that mediate or moderate the relationship with creativity.

Malik, Dhar, and Handa carried out a research on authentic leadership and its impact on creativity of nursing staff. They suggested that more experimental studies should be carried out in other industrial sectors to generalize these findings. As their work was based on one mediator only, they gave another recommendation of using other mediators to fully comprehend the association between authentic leadership and employee creativity and the factors that impact this relationship.

A research was conducted on relationship of authentic leadership and creativity by Rego, Sousa, Marques, and Cunha they suggested researchers to explore the variables they used to get a richer understanding of how these variables communicate empirically and interrelate with other variables. They endorsed using new mediating variables, such as psychological empowerment and work engagement.

Al Sahi AL Zaabi, Ahmad, and Hossan studied the association among authentic leadership and work engagement in Petroleum Company of UAE. They suggested the verification of relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement in another sector in UAE or elsewhere in another country.