Module 6 examined authentic and servant leadership as theories grounded in individual character, relationships, and virtue. Authentic leadership emphasizes self-awareness, balanced processing, relational transparency, and an internalized moral perspective. Servant leadership prioritizes followers’ needs, development, autonomy, and well-being. Although these theories offer valuable ideals, the readings demonstrated that leadership behaviors do not possess universal meanings. Race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities influence who is recognized as a leader and whether a behavior is interpreted as authenticity, service, weakness, aggression, or authority.
The authentic leadership debate centered partly on what it means for leaders to reveal their “true selves.” Einola and Alvesson (2021) argue that authentic leadership theory combines authenticity and leadership without adequately defining either concept. They contend that the theory relies on overly positive assumptions, weak causal evidence, and the false promise that self-aware individuals can resolve structural organizational problems. Gardner and McCauley (2022) respond that authentic leadership is aspirational and does not require leaders to disclose every private detail or behave identically in every situation. Relational transparency should be appropriate to the relationship and context. Alvesson and Einola (2022), however, maintain that popularity and positive practitioner experiences do not establish theoretical validity.
Hopkins and O’Neil (2015) expose another limitation: authenticity is gendered. Women may be judged insufficiently leader-like when they demonstrate communal qualities but viewed as aggressive or unfeminine when they behave assertively. Therefore, “being authentic” cannot be separated from the gendered standards through which others interpret behavior. The question is not only whether leaders express themselves honestly, but whether followers and institutions permit their identities to be understood as compatible with leadership.
The servant leadership readings reveal a similar contradiction. Liden et al. (2014) describe servant leadership through behaviors including emotional healing, ethical conduct, empowerment, conceptual skill, community-building, and prioritizing followers. Eva et al.’s (2019) systematic review associates servant leadership with positive follower, team, and organizational outcomes but identifies conceptual overlap, methodological limitations, and the possibility that continuously serving followers may deplete leaders’ emotional resources and contribute to burnout.
Liu (2019) provides the module’s most compelling intersectional critique. Her study examines an Asian male manager whose humility, compassion, and service reflected servant-leadership ideals. Nevertheless, racialized assumptions about Asian masculinity caused some employees to interpret these behaviors as passivity and weakness. They accepted him as a servant while resisting his authority as a leader. Liu demonstrates that servant leadership is not enacted in a power-neutral environment. The same behavior may strengthen a white male leader’s legitimacy while reinforcing stereotypes that undermine an Asian man. Likewise, directness in a white male leader may be interpreted as decisiveness, while a Black woman displaying comparable behavior may encounter the stereotype of being aggressive or combative. These patterns do not produce identical outcomes in every situation, but they make any supposedly identity-neutral theory of leadership incomplete.
Summary and Analysis of a Related Academic Article
We selected Ospina and Foldy’s (2009) review of 148 sources concerning race, ethnicity, and leadership. The authors argue that mainstream leadership scholarship frequently treats leaders of color as special cases while treating white leadership experiences as universal. This color-blind approach makes whiteness the unacknowledged standard against which leadership is recognized and evaluated.
The authors organize the literature around three questions. First, how does race affect perceptions of leadership? Research demonstrates that race influences who is authorized as a leader, whose competence is presumed, and how performance is evaluated. Second, how does race affect leadership enactment? Leaders of color may draw upon cultural knowledge, community relationships, bicultural fluency, and experiences with marginalization as leadership resources. Third, how do leaders and followers grapple with the social reality of race? This question moves beyond race as an individual characteristic and examines it as a system of meanings and power embedded within organizational structures and relationships.
Ospina and Foldy (2009) strengthen our interpretation of the module because they demonstrate that context is not merely background information surrounding leadership. Context helps produce leadership itself. Race can constrain leaders, become a resource through which they exercise agency, and shape collective efforts to challenge organizational inequality. The authors also caution against assuming that members of one racial group share a universal leadership style. Race interacts with gender, class, sexuality, professional identity, and organizational position in ways that must be examined rather than presumed.
This framework explains why Liu’s (2019) Asian manager could enact servant leadership without receiving full recognition as a leader. It also supports Hopkins and O’Neil’s (2015) conclusion that authenticity is interpreted through gendered expectations. Leadership is not determined solely by what a person does; it also depends on how followers interpret the person performing the behavior. White men are not immune from criticism or failed leadership, but they are more likely to resemble the historically constructed prototype of organizational authority. Marginalized leaders must more frequently consider whether humility will be interpreted as weakness, whether assertiveness will become aggression, or whether one mistake will be used to confirm a broader stereotype.
Advice to Future Students
We would advise future students not to approach this module as a search for the “best” virtuous leadership style. Authenticity and service sound universally desirable until identity, power, and organizational context are introduced. The more useful questions are: Who is permitted to appear authentic? Whose humility is recognized as strength? Who can exercise authority without being considered threatening, and who is expected to serve without being allowed to lead?
The module’s theories and critiques should be read together. Authentic and servant leadership offer worthwhile aspirations, but the critical readings reveal the conditions under which those aspirations become possible, costly, or contradictory. A holistic understanding of leadership must therefore include race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities, not as optional additions, but as forces that continually shape leadership recognition, enactment, and experience.
References
Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2022). The gaslighting of authentic leadership 2.0. Leadership, 18(6), 814–831. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427150221125271
Einola, K., & Alvesson, M. (2021). The perils of authentic leadership theory. Leadership, 17(4), 483–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427150211004059
Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004
Gardner, W. L., & McCauley, K. D. (2022). The gaslighting of authentic leadership. Leadership, 18(6), 801–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427150221111056
Hopkins, M. M., & O’Neil, D. A. (2015). Authentic leadership: Application to women leaders. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 959. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00959
Liden, R. C., Panaccio, A., Meuser, J. D., Hu, J., & Wayne, S. J. (2014). Servant leadership: Antecedents, processes, and outcomes. In D. V. Day (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of leadership and organizations (pp. 357–379). Oxford University Press.
Liu, H. (2019). Just the servant: An intersectional critique of servant leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 156(4), 1099–1112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3633-0
Ospina, S., & Foldy, E. (2009). A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 876–896. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.09.005