Authentic Leadership As a Driver of Moral Potency and Psychological Capital Among Hospice Staff

Purpose: Authentic leadership is a construct with a rich history in social work literature. Social workers in leadership roles are also concerned with promoting social justice, which involves increasing followers’ perceptions of both their commitment to social justice and their self-efficacy to act to promote it. A construct related to the promotion of social justice is moral potency, which involves a person’s perception of courage and efficacy to act on his/her values to bring about desired ends. This study sought to explore the relationship between authentic leadership and moral potency, with a hypothesis that higher perceptions of having received authentic leadership would drive greater moral potency among staff of hospice agencies, which in turn would contribute to overall psychological well-being of staff members as measured by the global well-being construct of psychological capital. 

Methods: Data was collected from hospice agencies in the  Southwest US.  Agencies were solicited to participate through an email invitation. Staff members of the respective agencies self-selected to participate in the study (N=176) and completed surveys either online or via paper-and-pencil.  The survey utilized 3 psychometric scales to capture the constructs of interest: the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire, the Moral Potency Questionnaire, and the Psychological Capital Questionnaire.

Scores on the respective scales were used to test a 3 variable path model with authentic leadership as the exogenous driver variable of the endogenous variables of moral potency and psychological capital, with moral potency serving as a mediator of the relationship between authentic leadership and psychological capital. The statistical significance of the indirect effect of moral potency on the relationship between authentic leadership and psychological capital was tested using bootstrapping sampling methods. Bootstrapping involves computing the unstandardized indirect effects using re-sampling drawn with replacement (N = 5000) to create a point estimate to establish a confidence internal for the indirect effect within the population. 

Results: Scores on all 3 scales met reliability standards of α > .70. All three variables were also positively correlated in the expected directions, with authentic leadership exhibiting a positive relationship with moral potency (r = .292, p < .001) and psychological capital (r = .173, p = .03).  Results of the path model indicated there was a significant indirect effect of moral potency on the relationship between authentic leadership and psychological capital (b = .1534, BCa CI [.0647, .2774]).  A subsequent Kappa squared test indicated that the indirect effect, according to the heuristics of Preacher & Kelly (2011), was “moderate” (κ²= .1535, 95% BCa CI [.0654, 2420]).  The moderate size of the indirect effect of moral potency within the path model supported the theorized causal order of the variables. 

Implications: Results suggests the importance of authentic leadership to the development of moral potency and psychological capital of staff within a hospice setting. Further efforts on the part of social workers to develop their authentic leadership skills in hospice settings will likely have value in promoting the moral potency and overall psychological capital of their fellow hospice staff.