Concluding Remarks

This phenomenological investigation has revealed some significant shortcomings in current accounts of authentic leadership. I have argued that a focus on specific quantifications is not robust enough to explain the concept of authentic leadership. Indeed, current definitions of authentic leadership remain problematic in part because of the tendency among some leadership scholars to define and constrain the ways in which authenticity reveals itself. Such thinking is troubling since it ignores how the intersections of identity, as well as cultural contexts, affect the theory and practice of leadership. This way of thinking about leadership privileges the universal over the particular, what Arendt (1958, p. 289) termed the ‘Archimedean worldview’. Such abstraction is not a useful way of conceptualizing how leadership works, particularly within everyday life. Rather, it is through our intersubjective, embodied relationships that we define ourselves. These meaningful encounters always take place within a world of others.