Authentic Leadership and Organization Citizenship Behavior: A Case of Pakistani Electronic News Media Industry

The role of leadership in an organizational system has remained of central concern in organization studies. Over the time, the emergence of various theories has unfolded the unique influential roles of leadership embedded in organizational management. Among various leadership styles and theories, a relatively new concept of Authentic Leadership (AL) is worthy of attention with respect to the changing demands of the media industry. The origin of the concept of authenticity is found in ancient Greek philosophy and it is defined in history as “being true to oneself”. Trust is the basic constituent based on which people can count on one another and work together in a conducive environment. AL is an idea to leadership that focuses on developing leader’s legitimacy via “honest relationships with followers”. In this study, AL is measured through four dimensions that include Self-awareness, Balanced Processing, Moral Perspective and Relational Transparency. Media is expected to be a watchdog on affairs of the state and government, therefore, the public requires media industry to be responsive, transparent and unbiased based on principles of ethics and true reporting. In order to achieve a positive environment and culture in the organization, this study focuses on the idea of Organization Citizenship Behavior (OCB) in connection with AL. This paper investigates the relationship between the said variables and tries to find out the impact of AL on OCB, for that matter, a quantitative research strategy has been followed. Respondents for this study were conveniently selected from bureau offices of six news channels making the sample size to be 220.