Leadership through crisis: the social construction of authenticity among banking CEOs

Despite a growing body of research around authentic leadership, our understanding of this concept has been limited by the assumption underpinning much of this work that there exists a 'true self' that is real and given. To counter this limitation, this study adopts a social constructionist perspective. Such an approach reveals how leadership authenticity is negotiated among social agents. Moreover, it challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions of existing theories that see 'authentic' traits and behaviours as being in some way 'fixed', rather than their being informed by context. The diverse ways in which the authenticity of Australian banking CEOs was portrayed by the print media during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) present an ideal site in which to explore the role of context in the social construction of authentic leadership. The application of Grint's (2005a) framework of leadership and problem-solving is applied to the research case in order to examine the role of context in authentic leadership. According to Grint, leaders can construct 'problems' as Tame, Wicked, or Critical in order to respectively suit a 'management', 'leadership', or 'command' response. This study extends Grint's framework by illustrating how the same 'problem' can be concurrently depicted by the media in different ways for different leaders. Additionally, the study identifies how leader responses to 'problems' are also framed in terms of consistency, coherence, and conformity. Specifically, leaders' responses to the GFC needed to appear consistent over time and resonate with their constructed core values; be framed in line with an ongoing coherent persona; as well as embody Australian values and gender stereotypes. The neglect of any one of these aspects saw the CEO's authenticity called into question, even when they appeared to match their response to the construction of the GFC. The study makes an original contribution to our understanding of authenticity by identifying the hitherto misunderstood role of conformity. Whereas the existing literature has been restricted to an individual level of analysis, assuming authenticity to be straightforwardly conveyed from leader to follower, this study shows that the media's use of verbal and visual structures in order to select, frame, and organise what a leader says and does cannot be ignored. By examining how the composition of newspaper layouts, graphic elements, and CEO portraits enhance or even subtly challenge the written text, this study demonstrates that representations of authentic leadership are necessarily constituted via interactions between multiple modes of discourse. The thesis shows that authenticity cannot be understood in isolation from context, because understandings of what it means to be an 'authentic leader' are invariably shaped by the economic environment, wider societal values, and the history of the Australian retail banks and the banking sector. For this reason, conformity to cultural and gender-based norms is a particularly important component of authenticity in this case. In the context of Australian banks and the media, this study has identified highly parochial and patriarchal notions of what it means to be 'authentic'.