The Impact of Authentic Leadership on Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Affective‐ and Cognitive-Based Trust

Authentic leadership has appeared as a significant field of research. Building on social exchange theory that explicates how individuals mutually mechanize reciprocation and eventually establish a trust-based relationship, we postulated a positive relationship between authentic leadership and followers’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Based on a two-wave time lagged design, the data were obtained from 270 employees working in a private banking sector of Pakistan. We found that authentic leadership is positively associated with subordinate’s OCBs, as well as leads to a higher-level of both affective‐ and cognitive-based followers’ trust. The results also indicated that both affective‐ and cognitive-based trust positively mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and OCBs. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.