One of the newest theories to gain widespread interest is authentic leadership. Part of the rationale for developing a model and subsequent instrument to measure authentic leadership was a concern that the more popular theory, the full range model of leadership and its instrument, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Bass & Avolio, 1985), did not sufficiently emphasize aspects of leader emotional intelligence (EI), such as self-awareness .In its current configuration, the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) (Walumba, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing & Peterson, 2008) Banks, McCauley, Davis, Gardner, and Guler (2016) found that, overall, authentic leadership is highly correlated with transformational leadership (k = 23, N = 5,414, rho = .72 (k = 47, N = 4,994, rho = .56)
measures four dimensions of leadership: relational transparency, internal moral perspective, balanced processing, and self-awareness. In a recent meta-analysis of authentic leadership,
. Given that a) EI is strongly related to transformational leadership, b) authentic leadership is very strongly related to transformational leadership, and c) part of the original rationale for creating a model and instrument to measure authentic leadership included a need to include more self-awareness in a leadership model, exploring the degree to which emotional intelligence is related to authentic leadership is important.In this study, 1,028 working adults completed the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) (Schutte, 2009) and the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (Walumba et al., 2008