Week 4 Assignment-Components of Authentic Leadership-Nursing Paper Examples

Part 1: Authentic Leadership

Interaction between Positive Psychological Capacities and Moral Reasoning and Critical Life Events

The model indicates that authentic leadership has four critical components: self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency. It also demonstrates positive psychological characteristics, moral reasoning, and critical life events preceding the four key components. Moreover, positive psychological characteristics include optimism, gratitude, compassion, self-esteem and self-confidence. In addition, elevation, creativity, resiliency, courage, integrity, and self-control, which elevate a leader’s authenticity. Moral reasoning describes the ability to think and act morally based on an individual’s specific and consistent behavioral pattern.

However, critical life events come into play between positive psychological traits and moral reasoning. Consequently, Critical life events are those experiences that prompt adjustment and adaptive behavior (Covelli & Mason, 2018). Furthermore,These events are formative and fundamental in shaping an individual’s psychological characteristics and moral reasoning. These events may include unemployment, divorce, or losing a loved one (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Critical life events are antecedent factors that influence authentic leadership. More so, by impacting psychological attributes and moral reasoning, reinforcing or negatively impacting psychological state and moral provisions. For instance, after multiple attempts to get a job, unemployment can negatively affect confidence or build resilience. Resilience is a positive psychological trait enhancing the authenticity of a leader (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Critical Life Events Influence Self-Awareness (Components of Authentic Leadership)

Self-awareness is integral to a leader’s authenticity. Self-awareness refers to personal insights and understanding of oneself, including strengths and weaknesses (Wiewiora & Kowalkiewicz, 2019). People hold unique core values, identities, emotions, motives, and goals they reflect on to understand themselves better (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Understanding these aspects allows individuals to trust their feelings and understand how they impact others. Consequently, with self-awareness, leaders can make better, inclusive decisions and improve employees’ satisfaction, commitment, and effectiveness. However, self-awareness is often not inborn, and people attempt to understand and know themselves throughout their lifespan.

Individuals reflect on past experiences, including critical life events, to improve their self-awareness.Critical life events are fundamental to one’s growth and development and gaining of self-knowledge (Covelli & Mason, 2018). Furthermore, these events dictate and indicate a person’s personality, values, habits, needs, and emotions. In this case, they are critical to skill development, understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses (Components of Authentic Leadership).

In addition, developing intuitive decision-making skills, managing and coping with stress, and understanding sources of motivation, limits, and capacity as leaders, which are integrals of self-awareness. For instance, losing a job leads to self-reflection on what might have gone wrong and where to improve to retain future jobs. Individuals reflect on attitudes, core values, motives, identity, and emotions in these circumstances, building self-knowledge (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Critical Life Events do not always lead to Self-Awareness or Internalized Moral Perspective

People react differently to critical life events, and it is not guaranteed that they will always lead to self-awareness or internalized moral perspective. There are other mediating factors; for instance, people react differently after losing a loved one or a job. These events strengthen some people and build resilience, optimism, confidence, and emotional intelligence, particularly empathy (Covelli & Mason, 2018). However, other people feel lost after losing a loved one and question their purpose in life and whether they can continue living without them (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Self-reflection can also lead to feelings of guilt, which is a negative psychological characteristic. Therefore, other factors enhance self-awareness, which is why some people become authentic leaders from critical life events while others do not. These factors might include personality, the support system, cultural and societal norms, and judgment of critical life events. For instance, people with an adequate support system are more likely to deal with grief positively than people lacking a support system, like family members and friends.

Previous Ability to Reason Morally or Life Events: Which impacts more Leadership Development?

Life events and past experiences will always be a building platform for any leader or individual. Life events shape individuals, including leaders, as they grow into who they are today (Covelli & Mason, 2018). Only those with consistent moral standards can admit to their previous ability to reason morally as more influential to leadership development than life events (Components of Authentic Leadership).

However, critical life events impact moral reasoning and help people know and understand themselves and apply lessons learned in future leadership environments, meaning life events impact leadership capacity more. Besides, leaders should always self-regulate using internal moral standards. More so, to guide behavior in different circumstances to enhance authenticity (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Part 2: Servant Leadership

A Contemporary Servant Leader and their Servant Leadership

Cheryl Bachelder, the Former CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, is a contemporary servant leader who helped revive the company. She actively and vocally advocates for servant leadership, basing her advocacy on the success and turnaround she achieved at Popeyes when the company’s value quadrupled. Bachelder is the author of the book about servant leadership “Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others,” which offers valuable insights regarding the value and positives of servant leadership (Components of Authentic Leadership).

Noticeably, Bachelder consciously adopted servant leadership, which was not common with many leaders in big companies (Berger III, 2021). She decided to lead by serving others, creating a workplace where individuals were respected and treated with dignity yet challenged to perform optimally (Berger III, 2021). She eradicated the silos and hierarchies and promoted collaboration and team play as her leadership platform. Bachelder measured results with rigor and discipline, which also promoted transformation at the company. Her journey and transformation of Popeyes depict why servant leadership is important (Components of Authentic Leadership).  

Bachelder’s Servant Leadership Analysis using Spear’s 10 SL Characteristics

Spear’s 10 SL characteristics of servant leadership include active listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to people’s development and growth, and building community (Takamatsu, 2022). Servant leaders are committed to listening intently and receptively to followers. Servant leaders demonstrate empathy and healing relationships, including with themselves and others (Components of Authentic Leadership).

These leaders demonstrate high-level emotional intelligence and self-awareness, deeply understanding one’s values, attitudes, emotions, feelings, ethics, and power and how the attributes impact others. Servant leaders are persuasive and effective at establishing consensus, resiliently persuading others instead of using positional authority or practicing coercion. Servant leaders address issues from a conceptualizing perspective, meaning thinking beyond everyday realities (Takamatsu, 2022).

A servant leader foresees a future outcome by borrowing past lessons and current realities. Servant leaders demonstrate stewardship, commitment to serve others, building trust, and holding something entrusted to them to the benefit of many. These leaders focus on other people’s development and growth in the organization, nurturing individuals to realize their full potential. Building community is integral to servant leadership, building their leadership on collaboration and team play(Components of Authentic Leadership).

Servant leaders are perceived opposites, which markedly identifies Bachelder in her time as CEO of Popeyes. The concepts of servant leadership allow people to understand Bacheldor’s leadership style and the mechanisms she adopted to transform the company. This approach shows how Bachelder is different from other previous leaders and how the story of taking a different, daring, and challenging journey by being tough-minded paid off. Bachelder fits most of these servant leadership attributes, particularly conceptualization and stewardship. She came into a company needing financial growth and thought of doing things differently (Berger III, 2021).

The fact that she consciously decided to lead the company by serving others makes her a servant leader able to look at a problem from a conceptualizing perspective, analyze what can work, and pursue her intents. She is a steward, taking care of the company entrusted to her for the greater good of everyone. Bachelder demonstrates foresight, using her understanding of servant leadership to predict positive outcomes and a turnaround at the company (Berger III, 2021) (Components of Authentic Leadership).

She is an active listener, always ready to listen to other people’s perspectives and their impact on the company’s success. Additionally, she borrows ideas from followers to make inclusive decisions to help the company succeed. Bachelder demonstrates self-awareness and self-knowledge regarding her core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior that guide her leadership.

After taking over the company as CEO, Bachelder committed to destroying the silos and hierarchies and building collaboration and team play, demonstrating the ability to build community (Berger III, 2021). She challenged people to perform optimally, treated them with respect and dignity, and measured results with rigor and discipline to help people grow and develop individually and professionally, which served the company well (Components of Authentic Leadership).

References

Berger III, J. B. (2021). Servant Leadership: Critical Self-Reflection on Our Individual Leadership Journeys. Army Law., 2.

Covelli, B. J., & Mason, I. (2018). Linking theory to practice: Authentic leadership. Academy of Strategic Management Journal, 16(3), 1-10. 

Takamatsu S. (2022). Coaching Servant Leadership: Scale Development and Validation. Frontiers in sports and active living, 4, 871495. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2022.871495

Wiewiora, A., & Kowalkiewicz, A. (2019). The role of authentic assessment in developing authentic leadership identity and competencies. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(3), 415-430.