Identifying the components of academic authentic leadership

Considering the nascentness of the topic of authentic leadership in the literature of leadership and the existence of ambiguity about its structure and components in the research that has been conducted, as well as there is an increasing trend seen in the last two decades toward authentic behaviors of leadership in the organizations, there is a need to a more and better understanding of the concepts and structure of authentic leadership among researchers in the field of management and leadership has intensified; the current research aims to reduce the structural ambiguity by more comprehensively identifying the concepts and components of authentic leadership, and by providing a systematic and focused study on the field of academic leaders, by providing an integrated model, answer the general question of what is the academic authentic leadership and what dimensions it consists of. This research has been done using a qualitative method of meta-synthesis. The research community includes 61 cases (articles, books/book chapters, and treatises) that were selected from among 2186 reviewed documents. The meta-synthesis findings led to the identification of 305 primary concepts, 59 subcategories, and finally 4 dimensions of authentic academic leadership including becoming oneself, positivity, relational authenticity, and ethical orientation. By describing the process and reasons for calculating the obtained components and comparing authentic leadership with other leadership styles, it has been tried to reduce the structural ambiguities and make it more transparent.