Authentic leadership and psychological ownership: investigation of interrelations

Purpose – Authentic leadership and psychological ownership appear to be at somewhat similar stage of construct evolution. In the present study, the author asks two research questions: first, how authentic leadership relates to psychological ownership and second, how dyadic duration influences this relationship. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Using correlational research design, the author collected cross-sectional data from 182 Indian professionals working in various organizations in India. The author used structural equation modeling to test the study hypotheses. Findings – The results showed that authentic leadership positively influenced organization-based promotive psychological ownership; however, it shared no relationship with preventive psychological ownership or territoriality. Relational transparency and self-awareness factorials of authentic leadership influenced belongingness and self-efficacy factorials of psychological ownership beyond what authentic leadership as the second-order factor could account for. Leader self-awareness negatively related to follower self-efficacy. Authentic leadership completely accounted for the effects of moral perspective and balanced processing factorials on psychological ownership. Dyadic duration was not found to have significant moderation effect. Research limitations/implications – Overall, the findings imply that authentic leadership may make followers dependent and allow less relational substitutability. Moral perspective may be more central to authentic leadership construct than self-awareness. Moreover, it may not be appropriate to consider territoriality as a part of psychological ownership construct. Originality/value – The author believes that it is the first study to investigate the factorial-level interrelations between authentic leadership and psychological ownership. It can help in advancing authentic leadership theory and refining psychological ownership construct.