Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers: Can wisdom predict authentic leadership?

Authentic leadership is part of an alternative leadership that is gaining in popularity compared with traditional forms of leadership. It is about making work places more meaningful, bringing perspective and changing the way things operate in organisations. I wanted to exam whether wisdom was related to authentic leadership. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing their own ratings of wisdom and authentic leadership. They were also required to request a colleague or employee to complete a questionnaire rating their authentic leadership behaviour. I examined both the five sub-dimensions (openness, emotional regulation, humour, critical life experience, and reminiscence and reflectiveness) of the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (SAWS: Webster, 2003) and an overall wisdom score of the SAWS to determine whether a combined score of wisdom, compared with each separate sub-dimension, was more effective in predicting authentic leadership. It was hypothesised that wisdom would be positively related to leader's self-ratings of authentic leadership and further that wisdom would be positively related to followers‟ ratings of authentic leadership behaviour. Data came from 82 religious leaders and 137 of their employees/colleagues. Leaders completed measures of wisdom and authentic leadership, whilst their employee/colleagues (followers) completed the authentic leadership questionnaire. Results found, after controlling for the personality traits of agreeableness and extraversion, a positive relationship between scores on a wisdom scale and self ratings of authentic leadership. There were no significant findings for follower ratings of authentic leadership behaviour. Implications of my results are discussed in relation to organizational outcomes