Lifting the veil: Seeking and contesting authenticity in CEO work

Abstract

Considerable emphasis is placed on authenticity in leadership today, and many leaders may genuinely try to behave in keeping with their "true" selves. We suggest, however, that due to the many conflicting demands on their work and to their public role, where direct expressions of innerness are deemed inappropriate, Chief executive officers (CEOs) cannot be authentic in the strict sense of the word. To lift the veil concealing authentic leadership, we look into the role of humor in CEO work through a series of conversations with CEOs of large companies in different industries. We contest the popular notion of authenticity in CEO work. We argue that when authenticity is pursued for strategic or instrumental reasons, its very nature will probably frustrate any efforts to be genuine. In this light, the current quest for authentic leadership can be viewed as a diversion from the difficult work carried out by CEOs rather than a reflection of it.

Humor in Workplace Leadership: A Systematic Search Scoping Review

“…Seven qualitative studies are included in this review, two of which used recordings from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) (Holmes and Marra, 2006;Schnurr, 2008). All seven qualitative studies used discourse analysis of meeting recordings and transcripts to demonstrate how humor can be used as a communication and discursive strategy to build rapport (Petraki and Ramayanti, 2018), construct leadership identity (Holmes and Marra, 2006;Välikangas and Tienari, 2018), and styles or to negotiate and establish power (Holmes and Marra, 2006;Rogerson-Revell, 2007Schnurr, 2008;Watson and Drew, 2017). Six of the seven studies used conversation interactions between leaders and their followers, one study interviewed CEOs only (Välikangas and Tienari, 2018).…”

“…All seven qualitative studies used discourse analysis of meeting recordings and transcripts to demonstrate how humor can be used as a communication and discursive strategy to build rapport (Petraki and Ramayanti, 2018), construct leadership identity (Holmes and Marra, 2006;Välikangas and Tienari, 2018), and styles or to negotiate and establish power (Holmes and Marra, 2006;Rogerson-Revell, 2007Schnurr, 2008;Watson and Drew, 2017). Six of the seven studies used conversation interactions between leaders and their followers, one study interviewed CEOs only (Välikangas and Tienari, 2018). There were 44 quantitative studies, of which 17 used the Humor Style Questionnaire (Martin et al, 2003) or part thereof, to assess leader humor use.…”

“Leisureship”: Impact of pursuing serious leisure on leaders' performance

“…Besides discrepancy in basic needs such as competence and affiliation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) leaders may also experience need discrepancy specific to their leader role. For example, several studies document that leaders need to feel and be perceived as authentic, and how paradoxes in the leader role make the satisfaction of this need particularly challenging (Nyberg & Sveningsson, 2014;Valikangas & Tienari, 2018). Another example is the need for high achievement, similar, yet different from competency and that is a frequent characteristic of leaders (Cai, Cai, Sun, & Feng, 2021), that may be increasingly hard to satisfy given the ambiguous nature of what constitutes leadership success (Ibarra et al, 2014).…”