The influence of authentic leadership on job performance in the Sri Lanka Air Force: The mediating role of employee engagement

Authentic leadership is a form of leadership, based on sincerity, and self-awareness. The authentic leader is genuine in beliefs, values, and mores, demonstrating a sincere desire for subordinates to advance in their careers, and for the organization to succeed. We conjecture that such leaders inspire employees to give of their best, engaging them in tasks, while leading them to strive for superior performance. Using an under-researched sample of Sri Lanka Air Force personnel, we created structural equations models using the Smart Pls software. We found that authentic leadership significantly influenced job performance in two ways, 1) directly, in an authentic leadership ?job performance relationship, and 2) indirectly in a mediation model, as authentic leadership ? employee engagement ? job performance.