Abstract

This study investigated authentic leadership (and its four components: self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information and relational transparency) as an antecedent of subordinates' satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, and in turn, subordinates' autonomous and controlled motivation. A web-based questionnaire was completed by managers and employees of the research and department team of a high-tech firm resulting in 24 manager-employee matches. The findings revealed that authentic leadership, and one of its component, self-awareness, were inversely related with controlled motivation, but contrary to expectations, authentic leadership did not yield any effects on need satisfaction, nor autonomous motivation. Although need satisfaction was found to contribute to autonomous motivation, it was interesting to find that employees had marginal agreement regarding their need satisfaction but in terms of their motivation, their agreement was low. This study's contributions to the extant literature, its implications, limitations, as well as future directions for research are discussed.