Authentic leadership questionnaire (ALQ) psychometrics

Excerpt

Authenticity, the concept of self-awareness acted out (Caza et al. 2010) or the functioning in a manner aligned with values (Leroy et al. 2012), has been the subject of great interest recently (Nelder and Schriescheim 2011), and is considered by many to be a “root construct” (Avolio and Gardner 2005) forming the foundation for all contemporary positive leadership theories (Qian et al. 2012) including transformation, ethical, servant, spiritual, and even charismatic leadership (Avolio and Gardner 2005; Nelder and Schriescheim 2011). While the early stage nature of authentic leadership has resulted in multiple conceptualizations (Caza et al. 2010), and there is contention over whether the construct includes moral and ethical prescriptives (Peus et al. 2012), the subject of this research note, the authentic leadership questionnaire (ALQ), was designed to include the ethical dimension of leadership (Walumbwa et al. 2008). My focus within this research note is not on the current theoretical debate, but only exploring whether the ALQ exhibits adequate validity and reliability to suggest its use in appropriate research. …