1 INTRODUCTION

Our academic field of leadership studies is plagued by an unscholarly obsession with fashions and clientelism. We have a pronounced penchant to tell our audiences what they like to hear and what makes us popular rather than what they need to know. Moreover, much of our work suffers from a chronic illusion that the study of leadership pertains to natural sciences and is governed by what to us at least appear to be highly elusive laws of causality. These two afflictions together skew the study of the fuzzy social phenomenon we have come to know as leadership, towards understandings of a world that many find intellectually unappealing, ideologically loaded, and practically misleading.

Despite our skepticism towards authentic leadership theory (see Alvesson & Einola, 2019, 2022; Einola & Alvesson, 2021), we do think that authenticity should be a topic of inquiry within the field of leadership and organization studies. We want to encourage our colleagues to be what the Enlightenment scholar and poet, Schiller, referred to as philosophical minds (Alvesson et al., 2022a) and use imaginative and novel approaches to conduct research in this area. In this article, we seek to both address some broader questions of what we suggest leadership studies is about—or rather could be about, and to engage directly with Helmuth, Cole and Vendette's article on authentic action (Helmuth et al., 2024).

中文翻译：

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真实的行动：成功的秘诀还是雷区？

1 简介

我们的领导力研究学术领域受到对时尚和依附主义的非学术痴迷的困扰。我们明显倾向于告诉观众他们喜欢听什么以及什么让我们受欢迎，而不是他们需要知道什么。此外，我们的大部分工作都长期存在一种幻想，认为领导力研究属于自然科学，并且受到至少在我们看来高度难以捉摸的因果律的支配。这两种痛苦共同扭曲了对我们所熟知的领导力这一模糊社会现象的研究，转向对这个世界的理解，许多人认为这个世界在智力上没有吸引力，在意识形态上充满了负担，而且实际上具有误导性。

尽管我们对真实性领导理论持怀疑态度（参见 Alvesson & Einola，  2019、2022；Einola & Alvesson，  2021），但我们确实认为真实性应该成为领导力和组织研究领域的一个探究主题。我们希望鼓励我们的同事成为启蒙学者和诗人席勒所说的哲学头脑（Alvesson et al.,  2022a），并使用富有想象力和新颖的方法来开展这一领域的研究。在本文中，我们力求解决一些更广泛的问题，即我们建议的领导力研究是关于什么的——或者更确切地说可能是关于什么的，并直接参与 Helmuth、Cole 和 Vendette 关于真实行动的文章（Helmuth 等人，  2024）。