Understanding the relationship between authentic leadership and types of organization : Within the stage of education

Abstract: Organizations are playing an increasingly important role in many aspects in our lives. It calls for a great need of authentic leaders who can properly manage these organizations and give birth to a society which is free from hatred, dishonesty and endless seek of power. We believe that such need is stronger when it comes to educational organizations. Here leaders constantly interact with students who will eventually become future leaders of our society. Their authentic leadership can influence and facilitate those future leaders to become authentic. Thus, the focus of this thesis falls on organizations in the stage of education. Our thesis aims to understand the relationship between authentic leadership and types of organization. In order to gain a broad understanding of this issue, we do not want to confine ourselves to the definition of “types”. We rather try to involve as many criteria as possible into the picture. They can be the purpose, the size, or the structure of organizations. Authentic leadership will no doubt have fundamental impacts on the organization, so is the other way around. Therefore, we try to understand what these impacts could be and how these impacts are formed.  For the sake of the diversity of empirical data, we have conducted conversations with six participants who come from organizations with different backgrounds, including schools (high school and university level), multilateral organizations, non-government organizations, etc. Our methodology is inspired from the actors approach to conduct our interviews, but also from the Grounded Theory for the earlier and later stages of the research.   Ultimately, we are able to see how leaders interpret and develop authentic leadership. Through their ways of being authentic, they try to impact students, employees, organizations and the society to a larger extent. Moreover, we have discovered that different types of organization can also have profound influences on leaders in terms of motivations, passions, and psychological states. We hope that our findings can contribute to a better understanding of authentic leadership in organizational context.