Effect of Authentic Leadership on Organizational Citizenship Behaviors through Mediating Roles of Followers’ Self-awareness and Psychological Ownership

Purpose – This study empirically validates the theoretical argument of the effect of authentic leadership on organizational citizenship behavior, and the mediating roles of followers’ self-awareness and psychological ownership between authentic leadership and followers’ organizational citizenship behavior. Research design, data, and methodology – A total of 380 office workers in Korea were surveyed through on-line, and the result was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equational modeling. Results – The authentic leadership was shown to be related positively to followers’ self-awareness and psychological ownership, both of which were associated positively with their organizational citizenship behavior. The complete mediating effects of followers’ self-awareness and psychological ownership were verified between authentic leadership and follower’s organizational citizenship behavior. Conclusions – While followers’ self-awareness was rarely studied in the authentic leadership study to date, it was found to play a role in the authentic leadership process into organizational outcome. It is argued that the followers’ self-awareness as a mediating role between authentic leadership and organizational outcome seems to be more appropriate than the leader’ s identification of previous thesis in explaining the authentic leadership effect.