The Impact of Authentic Leadership Behavior on Employee Trust, Job satisfaction, and Organizational Commitment: An Experimental Evaluation of a Workplace Intervention in a Healthcare Organization

This paper reports on three studies to test authentic leadership theory. For Study 1, 40 hospital supervisors were randomly assigned to authentic leadership behavior training or a waiting list control group. Pretest (n = 256) and posttest (n = 167) surveys from direct reports failed to find significant differences between the two groups. Study 2 was a quasi-experimental single group four-wave study on the same supervisors. Data from direct reports (n = 190for Time 3 and n = 182 for Time 4) showed that for those new to the supervisor, there was a significant increase in authentic leadership behavior and trust in the supervisor, but not in job satisfaction or organizational commitment. Study 3 was a nonequivalent group pretest/posttest design using data from the hospital’s annual engagement survey. Analyses found that direct report ratings of their supervisor’s leadership quality increased significantly more for the intervention supervisors (n = 38) than a nonequivalent control group (n = 59). These findings show that the authentic leadership training was effective in changing supervisor leadership behavior and trust in the supervisor but contrary to survey studies, not job satisfaction or organizational commitment, at least for new employees.