Authenticating the Leader

As authentic leadership, with its dictum of being true to the self, has become increasingly influential among practitioners and mainstream leadership scholars, critical writers have drawn attention to the negative consequences of this development. Yet, few scholars have investigated the problem of authentication within discourse of authentic leadership. If authentic leadership is to make any sense, it is necessary to be able to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic leader – in other words, it is necessary to authenticate the leader. This paper uses Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Plato as the point of departure for discussing the problem of authentication – separating the authentic leader form the inauthentic one – in the leadership guru Bill George’s model of authentic leadership. By doing so, the paper offers a way of conceptualizing the problem of authenticating leaders, as well as challenging procedure of separating the authentic from the inauthentic leader underlying the discourse on authentic leadership.