This paper of the magazine “Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. (GIO)” presents the psychometric properties and validation of the self-assessment form of the German Inventory of Authentic Leadership.

Authentic leadership has become one of the central positive leadership styles in recent years. Up to now, there has only been an other-rating version in German language to assess authentic leadership: The German Inventory of Authentic Leadership (DIAF-F). This article presents and tests the new instrument DIAF‑S for self-assessment of authentic leadership with the components self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing and an internalized moral perspective. For first validation, the DIAF‑S was tested on N = 91 leaders and N = 265 employees. The overall scale and three of four subscales showed satisfying to good internal consistencies. The DIAF‑S correlated significantly with criteria of organizational performance (work performance of employees, voice behavior and moral courage rated by leader). In addition, for a majority of the components the expected moderate correlation between self- and other-ratings of authentic leadership was evident. The use of the four-factor structure could be verified by confirmatory factor analysis in analogy to the other-rating version of authentic leadership.

An explorative factor analysis revealed rather a three-factor structure of self-rated authentic leadership. In this context, we discuss alternative models of authentic leadership. Overall, the DIAF‑S is a widely reliable and valid instrument for self-assessment of authentic leadership and thus an important supplement to the DIAF‑F.