Authentic leadership (AL) is among the recent perspectives on leadership which has received significant attention among academic researchers’ and practitioners. It is documented in the literature that authentic leadership (AL) and improved task performance are significantly associated (Leroy, Anseel et al., 2012) and this was supported for performance at both the group and firm levels (Hannah et al., 2011a) in both private and public sector organizations. Keeping in view the significance of authentic leadership in public/private sector organizations’ performance a systematic literature review has been carried out. The focus of current systematic literature was to identify the antecedents’ of authentic leadership and to identify its outcomes’ in organizational setup at three different levels; individual level’, group level, and organization wide. The review also studied mediating and moderating factors to attain performance in organizations alongside. This review incorporated 75 published articles from 2005 to July 2016. The review protocols and inclusion/exclusion criterion has been described at length in the main text. A significant number of elements were observed to carry out this systematic literature review such as, research approach, research design and method, sample size, level of analysis, cultural context, analytical technique, publishing journal and year of publication. A narrative approach to systematic review was adopted here. This narrative review has synthesized an inventory of variables which can be used (by fellow researchers) to conduct empirical studies in future. Moreover, this review can be helpful to identify gaps in the literature. This review is based on studies from 26 countries of the world and most of the studies are done in public sector organizations. The inventory of extracted variables is very diverse and is organized in tabular form . This inventory revealed four different categories of variables, which either predict the authentic leadership behavior , the intervening variables which acted as mediators between authentic leadership and some of its outcomes and essentially outcome variables of authetic leadership. Psychological capital, employee trust, organizational commitment, employee work engagements and followers’ positive emotions are frequently cited mediators between authetic leadership and its positive outcomes. Additionally,work group identification, organizational commitment, employee job satisfaction, follower work role performance, employee creativity, low turnover intention, increased group cohesion , greater organizational citizenship behavior , employee innovation and reduced work place bullying are some of the frequently mentioned outcomes of authetic leadership.
The systematic review can be summed up by saying that authentic leadership is more effective in public sector organizations since it has the ability to bring in higher attitudinal and behavioral outcomes from employees’(to increase performance ) to make the organizations’ more enduring while making constructive contribution in the society at large. Moreover, employees’ attitudinal and behavioral adaptations are more relevant in public service organizations due to low remuneration and perks in comparison with private sector organization.
