Authentic Leadership &Openness to change in Pakistani service industry

Organizations to engage in strategic change initiatives to remain competitive. Leadership is the top determinant of successful change. This study investigated the factor affecting the employee’s openness to change during the process of change and how leadership affects that. We proposed a theoretical framework modifying Yue et. al. (2019) by incorporating Authentic in place of transformational Leadership. We hypothesized that authentic leadership affects organizational trust during change both directly as well as by inducing transparent communication. Trust would in turn positively affect openness to change. Authentic leadership included 1. Self-Awareness 2. Relational Transparency 3. Balanced Processing and 4. Internalized Moral Perspective dimensions. Whereas transparent communication consisted of 1. Participation 2. Substantiality 3. Accountability Factors. Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data was collected from 310 employees working across different service industries in Karachi and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling.