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	Authentic Leadership Questionnaire	Empowering Leadership Scale
Field	Organizational Behavior	Organizational Behavior
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2008	2005
Originator	Fred Walumbwa, Bruce Avolio, William Gardner, Tara Wernsing & Suzanne Peterson; William Gardner et al.	Michael Ahearne, John Mathieu & Adam Rapp; Payal Sharma & Bradley Kirkman
Type	Leadership style measurement scale	Leadership style measurement scale
Seminal source	Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126.	Ahearne, M., Mathieu, J., & Rapp, A. (2005). To empower or not to empower your sales force? An empirical examination of the influence of leadership empowerment behavior on customer satisfaction and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(5), 945-955.
Aliases	ALQ, Authentic Leadership Measure, Walumbwa Authentic Leadership Questionnaire, Authentic Leadership Inventory	ELS, Leadership Empowerment Behavior Scale, Empowering Leadership Questionnaire, LEB
Related	3	3
Summary	The Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) is the dominant instrument for measuring authentic leadership, a positive leadership construct developed in the mid-2000s by Bruce Avolio, William Gardner, Fred Luthans, and colleagues. Authentic leaders are defined as those who are deeply aware of their own values, transparent in their relationships, balanced in processing information, and guided by an internalized moral compass. Gardner and colleagues' 2005 self-based model in The Leadership Quarterly laid out how leader authenticity develops and shapes followers, and Walumbwa and colleagues' 2008 Journal of Management paper operationalized the construct as a four-dimension higher-order factor and validated the ALQ across samples in the United States and China. The questionnaire measures self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective, and links them to follower trust, citizenship behavior, satisfaction, and performance. It anchored the rapid rise of authentic-leadership research within the positive-organizational-behavior movement.	The Empowering Leadership Scale measures the extent to which leaders share power with and build the self-influence of their subordinates rather than directing them from the top down. Empowering leadership describes a set of behaviors — enhancing the meaningfulness of work, fostering participation in decisions, expressing confidence in subordinates' capabilities, and providing autonomy from bureaucratic constraints. Ahearne, Mathieu, and Rapp's 2005 Journal of Applied Psychology study introduced an influential leadership-empowerment-behavior measure and showed, in a salesforce setting, that empowering leadership improves customer satisfaction and performance through subordinate self-efficacy and adaptability. Sharma and Kirkman's 2015 review consolidated the construct, its measures, and its mechanisms, clarifying how empowering leadership operates through psychological empowerment and self-leadership. The scale is now a standard tool for studying when and for whom sharing power energizes employees.