5.3 Minor Project: A Critical Analysis of Quantitative Leadership: Scholarship Presentation and Content Creation

Staying Grounded: Leadership Lessons from Quantitative Research

This week’s assignment had me mentally focused, even with its challenges. Digging into these quantitative scholarly articles gave me an unexpected lens for thinking about leadership, both in theory and in practice. My goal was not just to read these studies but to have the information start to resonate more clearly.    I believe this did happen.

Trust, Safety, and the Human Element at Work

The first article I examined was by Maximo, Stander, and Coxen (2019), titled Authentic leadership and work engagement: The indirect effects of psychological safety and trust in supervisors. This cross-sectional quantitative study surveyed 244 employees in the South African mining industry. Using tools like the Authentic Leadership Inventory, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, Workplace Trust Inventory, and the Psychological Safety Questionnaire, the researchers ran structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis to analyze the data.

Their purpose was threefold:

1. To examine the effects of authentic leadership (AL) on trust in supervisors, psychological safety (PS), and work engagement (WE).

2. To see if PS and trust in supervisors mediated the relationship between AL and WE.

3. To determine whether trust in supervisors affected the relationship between AL and PS.

AL here was grounded in the four classic dimensions noted by Avolio and Gardner (2005): self-awareness, balanced processing, moral perspective, and relational transparency. The study leaned heavily on prior definitions, particularly Edmondson and Lei’s (2004) understanding of PS as a perception of whether one can take interpersonal risks without jeopardizing status or career.

Interestingly, the study found that trust in supervisors did not directly influence the relationship between AL and PS underlines how complex the interplay between leadership and psychological safety truly is. The study's limitations included its cross-sectional nature, convenience sampling, and limited generalizability due to its single-site setting within a mining operation. Still, it made me reflect: leadership isn't just about intention; it’s about how that intention is perceived and felt across different workplace climates.

Authentic Leadership Meets Positive Psychology

Next, I turned to Rego, Lopes, and Nascimento’s (2015) article, Authentic leadership and organizational commitment: The mediating role of positive psychological capital. This one really resonated with me because it integrated the strengths-based lens of positive psychology with leadership theory.

The researchers aimed to test whether Positive Psychological Capital (PPC), defined by Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio (2007) as a state characterized by self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience, mediated the relationship between AL and organizational commitment (OC).

Their findings: self-efficacy, optimism, and hope all had a positive relationship with organizational commitment through the lens of AL. The outlier was resilience, which surprisingly showed a negative correlation. The more resilient individuals were, the less committed they were to the organization; this, perhaps, signals that those who can weather storms may also be more likely to seek new environments.

The study built on the foundational works of Gardner et al. (2005), Walumbwa et al. (2008), and Becker (1960), among others, to frame AL within a larger narrative of psychological resources. What stood out to me most here was how deeply psychological constructs can influence employee commitment—and how AL can foster those constructs when done authentically.

Mapping the Future of Spiritual Leadership

The third article I examined was by Rajni, Garg, and Jalan (2025), titled "Spiritual Leadership Research: Past, Present, and Future Using Biometric Analysis." Unlike the first two, this was a large-scale bibliometric study of 286 articles published in Scopus-indexed journals. Think of it as a scholarly map of the evolving field of spiritual leadership (SL).

Their research questions explored publication and citation trends (RQ1), the most influential scholars and journals (RQ2), and the themes and gaps in the field (RQ3). Unsurprisingly, Fry (2003, 2004), a foundational figure in SL theory, was the most cited. Fry’s work emphasized concepts like vision, hope/faith, altruistic love, and mindfulness as central to SL. His causal model of SL, along with subsequent studies with Slocum (2008), expanded the conversation to include employee well-being, life satisfaction, and corporate social responsibility.

Fairholm’s (1999) contributions were also recognized for connecting SL with Servant Leadership, extending Greenleaf’s (1977) early ideas. Mango (2018) contextualized this by noting that leadership studies now encompass over 1,500 definitions and more than 60 unique theories, illustrating the complexity and layered nature of our understanding of leadership.

What I appreciated most from this article was the visual clarity and data-driven insight into how SL research is evolving globally.

Final Thoughts

These three articles reminded me that leadership isn’t static; it’s dynamic, lived, and shaped by ongoing communication. From the impact of authentic leadership on trust and engagement to the transformative potential of positive psychology and the spiritual dimensions of leading with purpose—there’s so much to apply and reflect on. Each study had its strengths and blind spots, but all reinforced a central truth I carry with me: leadership is about more than behavior, it's about belief, trust, and inner purpose.

Link to Presentation: 733 wk5 pp Take3.pptx

References

Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001

Becker, H. S. (1960). Notes on the concept of commitment. American Journal of Sociology, 66(1), 32–40.

Edmondson, A., & Lei, Z. (2004). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23–43.

Fairholm, M. R. (1999). Leadership and the culture of trust. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Fry, L. W. (2003). Toward a theory of spiritual leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(6), 693–727. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.09.001

Fry, L. W., & Slocum, J. W. (2008). Maximizing the triple bottom line through spiritual leadership. Organizational Dynamics, 37(1), 86–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2007.11.004

Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., May, D. R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005). Can you see the real me? A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 343–372.

Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Paulist Press.

Ilies, R., Morgeson, F. P., & Nahrgang, J. D. (2005). Authentic leadership and eudaemonic well-being: Understanding leader–follower outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 373–394.

Luthans, F., Youssef, C. M., & Avolio, B. J. (2007). Psychological capital: Developing the human competitive edge. Oxford University Press.

Mango, E. (2018). Influence of leadership on employee productivity. Journal of Entrepreneurship & Organization Management, 7(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.4172/2169-026X.1000234

Maximo, N., Stander, M. W., & Coxen, L. (2019). Authentic leadership and work engagement: The indirect effects of psychological safety and trust in supervisors. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 45, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v45i0.1542

Rajni, N., Garg, R., & Jalan, A. (2025). Spiritual leadership research: Past, present, and future using biometric analysis. Journal of Religion and Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-025-01817-9

Rego, A., Lopes, M. P., & Nascimento, J. L. (2015). Authentic leadership and organizational commitment: The mediating role of positive psychological capital. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 8(1), 129–147. https://doi.org/10.3926/jiem.1248

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126.