(2003), the advent of work on authentic leadership
development came as a result of writings on
transformational leadership, in which authors
such as Bass & Steidlmeier (1999) suggest that
there are pseudo versus authentic transformational
leaders.
Luthans & Avolio (2003) also introduced
the concept of authentic leadership development
into the literature with the goal of integrating
work on (Luthans 2002) positive
organizational behavior with the life-span leadership
development work of Avolio (1999).
Their main purpose was to examine what constituted
genuine leadership development including
what worked and didn’t work to develop
leaders and leadership, as well as to bring
to the foreground some of the recent work
in positive psychology as a foundation for examining
how one might accelerate the development.
Luthans and Avolio reasoned that
using some of the theoretical work in positive
psychology such as Fredrickson’s (2001)
broaden-and-build theory, they could offer a
more positive way for conceptualizing leadership
development. According to Fredrickson,
those individuals who have more positive psychological
resources are expected to grow more
effectively or to broaden themselves and build
out additional personal resources to perform.
Luthans and Avolio report that to a large extent,
the prior leadership development work
was based on a deficit-reduction model strategy,
where one discovered what was wrong with
a leader and then worked to correct deficits in
terms of focusing on the leader’s development
(also see Avolio & Luthans 2006).