Open Journal of Leadership, 2021, 10, 95-109

[Link]
ISSN Online: 2167-7751
ISSN Print: 2167-7743

Understanding Authentic Leadership Style:

The Satya Nadella Microsoft Approach

Deepti Prakash, Meenakshi Bisla*, Shweta Gupta Rastogi

University School of Management Studies, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India

How to cite this paper: Prakash, D., Bisla, Abstract

M., & Rastogi, S. G. (2021). Understanding
Authentic Leadership Style: The Satya Na- The paper endeavours to analyze authentic dimensions of Leadership with
della Microsoft Approach. Open Journal of Satya Nadella’s leadership and his aggressive strategy leading to an increase in
Leadership, 10, 95-109. Microsoft’s profitability. A total of 7 interviews of Nadella from 2014 to 2020
[Link]
were coded in NVivo to prepare Word query, TreeMap and cluster analysis.
Received: February 26, 2021 Also, besides tweets associated with #Satya Nadella were captured using
Accepted: June 5, 2021 NCapture and exported to NVivo to obtain the sentiments by performing
Published: June 8, 2021
sentiment analysis. The Twitter analysis of Nadella’s personality is majorly
Copyright © 2021 by author(s) and
positive and neutral which reflects his success and influence across the globe.
Scientific Research Publishing Inc. The traits of Nadella are linked with authentic leadership style. The study
This work is licensed under the Creative discusses the latent dimensions for becoming a successful authentic leader
Commons Attribution International
that is highly recommended for leaders to boost their leadership skills and
License (CC BY 4.0).
[Link]
increase organization’s profitability in this competitive world.
Open Access
Keywords
Satya Nadella, Profitability, Authentic Leadership, Strategy, Vision,
#SatyaNadella

1. Introduction
The scenario of corporate crises due to rising frauds and scams worldwide has
created stress among stakeholders. Stress can immensely damage the trust, the
culture can even refrain an employee from discovering its potential creativity.
These circumstances enable stakeholders to prefer leaders with higher integrity.
In this context, leadership plays an important role in encouraging creativity and
innovation among followers (Oke, Munshi, & Walumbwa, 2009). In this context,
authentic leadership has gained widespread attention in organizations. Thus, by
developing the culture of authentic leadership an enhanced creative workforce
can be expected in the organization (Chaudhary & Panda, 2018).

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D. Prakash et al.

Leaders who present their true selves and lead others are known as authentic
leaders. Authentic Leadership proposed by Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing
and Peterson (2008) is leadership behavior pattern that includes self-awareness,
internalized moral perspective, relational transparency and balanced processing
(Gardner & Carlson, 2015; Miao, Humphrey, & Qian, 2018). Millennials now
make up the largest generation in the workforce. They are better educated, more
tech-savvy, and have higher expectations than any other group prior. Millennial
Employee Engagement Study conducted by Cone Communications found that
three-fourth millennials are willing to accept a pay cut if they are working for a
socially responsible company. Besides, Generation Z members, the newbie on
the work front, values diversity when selecting a place to work. In a Forbes arti-
cle, Karl Moore (Professor at McGill University) points out: The better you are
at being an authentic leader, the more your millennial employees will appreciate
you. He adds that millennials can detect a drop of inauthenticity in an Olym-
pic-sized pool like our Caribbean reef shark friends. The actual driving force for
Microsoft’s growth and enormous profits in recent time is by endeavoring a
handful of courageous authentic decisions under the Leadership of Satya Nadella.
Microsoft’s ranking is experiencing upside down for the last six years (Table 1).
The magnifying glass on revenue and assets will help to identify the actual posi-
tion more precisely (Table 1). Microsoft is experiencing stable growth after the
change of leadership i.e., after 2014, when Nadella became the Chief Executive
Officer (CEO).
Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in 2014 and adopted a new vision and
leadership style for Microsoft’s unique journey. This paper examines the rela-
tionship between the leadership style of Nadella and his vision which supports
the importance of precise balance between supportive leadership and innovative
organizational culture for achieving the goal of high organizational performance.
This study discusses the managerial implication for highly competitive Informa-
tion and Technology (IT) organizations worldwide. The study examines the role
of a leader in transforming a stagnant organization such as Microsoft under
Balmer before 2014 (Table 2) into a high technological innovator accelerating
up the scoreboard in Fortune 500 ranking. Nadella has acquired the dominant
position in both “Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year 2019” and “Best CEOs
for Diversity 2020”.

Table 1. Microsoft’s Ranking in Fortune 500 (2019) under Nadella’s leadership.

Ranking Year Revenue ($ millions) Profit ($ millions) Assets ($ millions)

21 2020 125,843 39,240 286,556
26 2019 110,360 16,571 258,848
30 2018 89,950 21,204 241,086
28 2017 85,320 16,798 193,694
25 2016 93,580 12,193 176,223
31 2015 93,580 12,193 128,000

(Source: [Link]

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 D. Prakash et al.

Table 2. Microsoft’s ranking in fortune 500 under Balmer’s leadership.

Year 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010

Ranking 34 35 37 28 25
Revenue 77,849 73,723 69,943 --- ---

([Link]

Nadella took the challenging job as CEO of Microsoft in 2014 when Microsoft
was not at its best position. In 2014, Nadella joined as Chief Executive Officer
who helped Microsoft to extricate and faced three major challenges mentioned
below:
• Crashed stock prices of Microsoft;
• Competitors (Apple and Google) making super-profits;
• Introducing new mobile technology.
Microsoft is the fourth, world’s highest valuable organization and has in-
creased its value by $250 billion (Fox, 2019) under Nadella’s leadership, which
makes it is the essence of this study. The paper endeavors to analyze authentic
dimensions of Leadership with
Nadella’s visionary leadership and his aggressive strategy was leading to an
increase in Microsoft’s profitability. It also discusses the latent dimensions for
becoming a successful authentic leader that are highly recommended for leaders
to boost their leadership skills and increase organization’s profitability in this
competitive world.

2. Literature Review
According to Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson (2008), au-
thentic leadership (AL) is defined as “a pattern of leader behavior that draws
upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical
climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, bal-
anced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of
leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development”. Self-awa-
reness refers to the degree of awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses and
their impact on other people. Internalized moral perspective signifies the im-
portance of how one’s values and moral standards regulate their behaviors and
actions. Relational transparency relates to the degree to which how one shares
information and display emotions openly. Balanced processing depicts the ex-
tent to which a leader uses the available information before arriving at a decision
(Chaudhary & Panda, 2018). These dimensions increase the level of balanced
information treatment, transparency and relational work between a leader and
his followers, in the way that positive self-development of followers is promoted
(Semedo, Coelho, & Ribeiro, 2017). The dimensions of being self-aware and
relationally transparent and balanced processing of information help authentic
leaders to encourage trust and positive interpersonal relationships among their
followers (Avolio, Gardner, Walumbwa, Luthans, & May, 2004; Walumbwa,
Luthans, Avey, & Oke, 2011).

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D. Prakash et al.

Authentic Leadership maximize the performance of followers and leads to

positive work-related outcomes (Ribeiro, Gomes, & Kurian, 2018b; Azanza,
Gorgievski, Moriano, & Molero 2018; Imam, Naqvi, Naqvi, & Chambel, 2020).
Authentic leader transparency in his decisions develops follower’s commitment
and builds strong attachments to the organization (Rukh, Shahrukh, & Iqbal,
2018; Hlongwane & Olivier, 2017). Empirical studies suggested that Authentic
leadership is positively related to numerous necessary outcomes, for example,
job satisfaction, Performance and creativity (Gardner, Cogliser, Davis, & Dick-
ens, 2011; Ribeiro, Duarte, & Filipe, 2018a; Ribeiro, Duarte, Filipe, & Torres de
Oliveira, 2020).
Authentic leaders help promote a work environment wherein creativity is fos-
tered and encouraged by involving specific actions guided by beliefs, values, and
words, thereby contributing to a truthful and open relationship with their fol-
lowers (Ilies, Morgeson, & Nahrgang, 2005; Rego, Vitória, Magalhães, Ribeiro, &
Cunha, 2013). It has been suggested that authentic leaders positively influence
employees’ creativity (Avolio et al., 2004; Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, May, &
Walumbwa, 2005; Rego, Sousa, Marques, & e Cunha, 2012, 2014; Rashid, Islam,
Asif & Ahmer, 2019). When close relationships between authentic leaders and
employees are established then employees feel free to try new ideas. Research
also shows that increasing employees’ perceiving psychological safety and in-
herent motivation provides a fearless climate of working with new ideas (Cerne,
Jaklic, & Škerlavaj, 2013; Rego et al., 2012, 2014).
Further, Cottrill, Lopez and Hoffman (2014) suggested that developing self-
awareness, transparency, ethics, and processing multiple perspectives as authen-
tic leadership skills, will benefit the organizations by enhancing employee inclu-
sion, commitment, self-esteem and organizational functioning.

3. Research Methodology
3.1. Research Objectives
The objectives of the study are
Objective 1: To depict Nadella’s leadership journey at Microsoft through four
dimensions of authentic leadership.
Objective 2: To examine the public sentiments of tweets regarding #Sat-
yaNadella in NVivo.

3.2. Data Collection

The researcher searched in the Google Scholar, Microsoft Academia, Harvard
Business Review (HBR), newspapers, and websites. The search words like “au-
thentic leadership”, “Microsoft”, “creative leadership”, “innovation” and “Satya
Nadella” were used to explore the literature. Initially 60 articles emerged which
were further refined by following a trial search for each database by going
through the abstract and full paper after that. A total of 29 research articles are
obtained after removing duplicate and irrelevant articles. For Word Query analysis

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 D. Prakash et al.

using Nvivo, only seven interviews of Nadella are obtained from

[Link] (2014), [Link] (2015),
[Link] (2018), [Link] (2017),
[Link] (2019), [Link] (2019) and
[Link] (2020) to obtain word query analysis, treemap, cluster
analysis. The interviews are available online either as audio or video which were
transcribed into written form as a word document by researchers one by one.
The researcher restricted searches for interviews for leadership of Nadella at Mi-
crosoft from 2014 until April 2020 for NVivo software analysis. The interviews
are available online free of cost.
For sentiment analysis, #SatyaNadella tweets data is obtained using NCapture
from Tweeter to analyze the public opinion towards Nadella on 3rd July 2020 in
NVivo qualitative software. The tweets and retweets captured were 1531, but af-
ter removing irrelevant tweets from either unauthorized tweeter accounts or ir-
relevant tweets, the total count of tweets obtained was 1084. NVivo analytics
aligned the characteristics and strategies of Nadella to the theory of authentic lead-
ership to examine the relationship between the two using the 29 selected papers.

3.3. Data Analysis Procedure and Techniques

The interviews are available online either as audio or video which were tran-
scribed into written form as a word document by researchers one by one. These
seven interviews of Nadella from 2014-2020 were imported in QSR NVivo soft-
ware. The nodes were classified as the four components of Authentic leadership
theory mentioned above and references from each interview were taken into ac-
count to analyze the relationship between them. The word query tool was per-
formed to analyzed using NVivo Qualitative analysis tool using the filter of a
minimum of three words and stemmed approach (generalized) to obtain word
cloud (Figure 1), treemap (Figure 2) and Cluster analysis (Figure 3).
To explore the personality of Nadella, tweets of #SatyaNadella were extracted
using NCapture on July 3, 2020 to find the general popularity of his personality.
These tweets were analyzed using “Autocode” approach in NVivo tool using the
option “to identify sentiment” based on each and every sentence mentioned in
the tweets and retweets. The sentiment analysis represented the positive, nega-
tive, neutral and mixed sentiments towards Nadella (Figure 4), the tweets cap-
tured across the globe (Figure 5) and the representation of tweets collected net-
work as Sociogram.

4. Analysis and Discussion

4.1. Qualitative Analysis
4.1.1. Word Query of Nadella’s Interview Performed in NVivo Software
The seven interviews of Nadella from 2014-2020 were analyzed in NVivo using
word frequency query tool with the filter of a minimum of three words and
stemmed approach (generalized) to obtain word query analysis (Figure 1), tree

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D. Prakash et al.

map (Figure 2) and Cluster analysis (Figure 3). Figure 1 shows Nadella’s con-
cern about technology bound Microsoft. The relevant words were found to be
“Satya”, “Nadella”, “Microsoft”, “technology”, “leadership”, “innovation”, “em-
ployees” and “culture”. The greater the size of the word appears, the larger is the
frequency of the word in word query analysis. It is interpreted from Figure 1
that Nadella focuses on the thinking part of how to inculcate change in his or-
ganization by innovating. To do so, he needed to change the leadership style and
culture of Microsoft (Smale, 2019). This word query analysis displays Nadella’s
personality and establishes the relevancy of the interviews selected depicting
Nadella.
Figure 2 shows the TreeMap obtained from NVivo Analytical tool performed
on interviews of Nadella depicting the three broad themes as “microsoft”,
“think” and “thing”. It represents that Nadella mostly speaks about Microsoft
and thinks about it. The other relevant words depicting his focus are “technol-
ogy”, “create”, “product”, “people”, “learning”, “business”, “satya”, “nadella”,
“ceo” and “microsoft”. The focus of Nadella is primarily on the need to create
technology or products by developing a learning approach among people (em-
ployees in general) for a business. He motivates his employees to innovate and
create new technology by continuous learning is depicted from treemap. His
rank was 40 in the list of most powerful people 2018 by Forbes.
Figure 3 depicts the cluster analysis performed in NVivo Analytical tool using
interviews of Nadella. The cluster analysis groups the words of one theme in one
colour and other words of different themes into different colors. Here, the dark
coloured theme is focusing on industry which is built on technology and culture.
The change brought by Nadella in culture by focusing on building technology
(Cloud-enabled AI) accelerated the revenues and transformed Microsoft (Table
1).

Figure 1. Word query analysis. (Exported from QRS

NVivo Qualitative Software on January 2, 2021).

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 D. Prakash et al.

Figure 2. Tree map. (Exported from QRS NVivo Qualitative Software on January 2, 2021).

Figure 3. Cluster analysis. (Exported from QRS NVi-

vo Qualitative Software on January 2, 2021).

4.1.2. The Sentiment Analysis of Tweets #SatyaNadella

In pandemic, Microsoft is the first organization to provide 3 months parental
leave to their employees whose schools were shut down due to pandemic situa-
tion in the world in early 2020. Microsoft provided a free of cost interface for
promoting team work by developing “Microsoft Teams”, which highlight its vi-
sion of embracing team work culture. Nadella is one of the leaders to help his
employees in every possible circumstance observed from his initiatives. More-
over, over the past six years, Nadella has shown his leadership skills to embrace
diverse culture and enhance Microsoft’s profitability after joining as CEO in
2014. Because of his constant efforts to encirclement diversity, he has topped the
list of “Best CEOs for Diversity 2020” voted by employees of color and indige-
nous individuals, reported by Comparably.
During this pandemic where all the organizations face critic’s lens, the image
of Nadella emerged to be positive by performing sentiment analysis using tweeter

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D. Prakash et al.

data (tweets obtained on June 3 2020 for #SatyaNadella). The majority of the
tweets are neutral and positive out of total 1084 tweets and retweets (Appendix).
Figure 6 shows that the neutral and positive tweets account for 78% of the
tweets, and the mixed and negatives tweets account for a mere 11% and 12% re-
spectively.
The tweets obtained were from across the globe but more than 90% were ob-
tained from North America as shown in Map in Figure 4.
The Sociogram Twitter in Figure 5 depicts the network of tweets and retweets
obtained using the NVivo analytical tool. The sociogram appears to be like a ball
which specifies that the retweets on the tweets of #SatyaNadella were immensely
spread like a web across the globe. Hence, the importance of examining Nadella’s
leadership traits in one of the most successful IT giants “Microsoft” is of immense
importance. The leaders can learn a lot from Nadella’s journey and personality as
he is the first in the “Best CEOs for Diversity 2020” (Comparably, 2020).

Figure 4. World Map of tweets #SatyaNadella. (Exported from QRS NVivo Qualit-
ative Software on January 2, 2021).

Figure 5. Sociogram Twitter of tweets #SatyaNadella. (Exported

from QRS NVivo Qualitative Software on January 2 2021).

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 D. Prakash et al.

Figure 6. Sentiment analysis of Tweets #SatyaNadella. (Exported from

QRS NVivo Qualitative Software on January 2, 2021).

4.2. Nadella’s Journey and Leadership

Nadella began his journey in Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. He has evolved
into a more productive and farsighted individual at Microsoft which is one rea-
son behind his successful leadership style, he mentioned during his interview
with BBC. He explores the organization by examining its existing culture, then
introducing new values, norms, shared assumptions and vision for smooth
adopting a new culture he wants to incorporate. The roles performed by Nadella
are, 1) to recognize the need to revitalization, 2) creating new vision, 3) institu-
tionalizing change. Studies provide evidence for the importance of the positive
effect of authentic leadership style on creativity (Rego et al., 2012, Rego et al.,
2014). Walumbwa et al. (2008) classified authentic leadership into four compo-
nents, “1) Self-awareness, 2) Relational transparency, 3) Internalized moral per-
spective and 4) Balanced processing.” Comparing these characteristics with
those of Nadella’s, it is evident that the leadership style adopted by him involved
many hurdles and vilipend comments from critics. Nadella joined and an-
nounced himself as an ordinary individual who focuses more on collaboration,
learning, stimulate intellectuality and creativity. His approach for expected cul-
ture was results-driven instead of aggressiveness and competitive culture during
Ballmer’s days. Hence, Microsoft was on acceleration after Nadella joined as
CEO. He had fulfilled the four characteristics of authentic leadership explained
in Table 3.
After joining Microsoft in 2014, Nadella changed the leadership and culture
by emphasizing embracing individual empowerment, positivity, empathy and
growth of employees, according to article on Nadella’s Leadership style in Ber-
rett Koehler Publishers (2019). Let’s bridge the gap between Nadella’s initiative
as CEOs and authentic leadership traits (Table 3). Firstly, he is an empathetic

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Table 3. Relationship between nadella’s leadership style and authentic leadership.

Sr No Leader’s skills Definition Nadella’s ideologies depicting leader’s skills (Example)

Nadella gained the top spot in “Best CEO for diversity 2020” in Comparably Awards,
where employees of color voted i.e., employees think Nadella to be an inclusive leader
and who give equal opportunity to all irrespective of any color. He endeavoured
Authentic leaders exhibit the
diversity and said diversity leads to new creative innovative ideas. Nadella’s strength
awareness their strength,
lies in influencing followers to develop new ideas by providing brainstorming
weakness; express how others see
sessions, giving equal opportunity to all, and his constant encouragement to work in
them and how he impacts others.
teams. He encourages employees to be innovative and creative by providing his
Leaders having a high level of
support, thus developing an environment of trust among employees. Also, followers
self-awareness can influence their
tend to feel good when he is around, depicting his positive interpersonal relationships.
1 Self-Awareness followers’ choice of behaviour,
He believes in Teamwork and thus introduced new features in Microsoft Teams i.e.,
thinking, and motivate them to
“Together Mode” for encouraging teamwork for everyone. Through Nadella’s
encourage trust for building
declaration of doing meaningful work, he positively influences his employees to
positive interpersonal
develop innovative ideas to endeavour sustainability. His global skill initiative to help
relationships among their
others (not only his employees) is driven by his empathetic characteristics, which are
followers, which eventually
highly appreciated by individuals globally, improving Nadella and Microsoft’s overall
promotes creativity.
impression. He communicated 3R to his followers that can help them to overcome
challenges faced
• Reacting, • Responding • Reimagining

Nadella openly communicated his expectation to his employees in three simple

approach

Authentic Leaders display • Create clarity

authentic selves because they • Strike energy
openly share information,
• Ability to achieve success
feelings, emotions, and thoughts
with their followers. It provides He hosts open sessions like “ask me anything” to encourage the forthcoming
an opportunity for their employees with ideas and develop a relationship of accessible information and trust
Relational followers to express their He supports his followers, develops trust through his leadership style, and encourages
2 teamwork among his employees. He gave way to brainstorming sessions and a new
transparency opinions, ideas, and challenges.
Authentic Leaders create an open work environment to enhance creativity. He collaborated with competitors to
environment of honesty, embrace innovation and creativity. He encourages employees to examine market
openness, and trust for critically and come up with innovative ideas
promoting creativity among their
followers and encourage them to
He is rated highest in interpersonal skills by his employees as they refer to him as a
generate new ideas.
happening person and tagged him as most favorite individual. He allowed individual
employees to create innovative ideas and support employees in creative yet risky
projects. He encourages challenge taking behavior of employees.

Authentic leaders strongly Nadella is rated as “Best CEO for Diversity 2020” depicting his high moral and ethical
express their consistent moral values regarding diversity and inclusivity. His values and fair decisions have
values and standards while imprinted him as best inclusive leader by the employees of color. He prefers diversity
comparing it to social, for enhancing creativity as he stated that Diversity inclusion is “A pillar for success.”
organizational, and team He addressed the social injustice in America by clearly communicating his
pressures. They also reveal how commitment, through mail to all his employees, to take actions to control racial
Internalized
much their behaviours and injustice, inequity, and unambiguously believe that “Black lives matter.” He updated
3 moral
decisions are aligned with Microsoft policies and taking initiatives to make Black lives better by providing
perspective
internalized values. They technological support to individuals of color. Nadella’s behaviour is consistent with
promote integrity and honesty, his moral value of embracing inclusive diversity to enhance creativity
and discourage unethical
behaviours that lead to positive
climate and trust and, thereby, He believes in happier customers, employees and partners by focusing on “inclusivity,
creativity. trust & sustainability.”

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Collaborating with rival firms and taking risks to encourage team work and grow with
Authentic leaders analyze the them. The collaboration brings trust in leader’s role for enhancing creativity. Nadella’s
entire information objectively his initiative to bring education back on track by working with a partner is highly
before making a decision, appreciated by his followers. His three meeting rules i.e., •listen more • talk less • be
improving fairness in decisive, became very popular. He intends to combine the fragments of Microsoft into
decision-making to promote one.
Balanced
4 positive interpersonal
processing
relationships and trust, which
eventually develops an emotional After examining the environment, Nadella stated that the world is heading towards
attachment among followers transforming from the traditional work culture into new a hybrid work system and
towards their organizations and culture. He calls it the new regular work, which focuses on results rather than the
enhances creativity. number of hours logged in. This decision has encouraged employees to be more
productive and developed a sense of attachment for Nadella in pandemics.

and inclusive leader who gives importance to diversity to generate new innova-
tive ideas and motivate employees to develop new ideas by organizing brain-
storming sessions. His influence on others and his high level of self-awareness
undoubtedly makes him the “Best CEOs for Diversity 2020” (reported by Com-
parably) depicting his strength. Secondly, he was considered the most happening
person and rated highest in his interpersonal skills by his fellow mates in Mi-
crosoft over the last five years showing his strong interpersonal skills. Also, he
provided an opportunity to be heard with the help of strong communication
channel conducting “ask me anything sessions” depicting his relational trans-
parency characteristics. Thirdly, his verge of building a culture of trust around
the concept of equitable growth with “inclusivity, trust and sustainability” shows
his strong internalized moral perspective. Lastly, the balanced approach of
Nadella is depicted by his supportive style and clear vision of being a partner led
company, collaborating with rival firms to generate innovative ideas and posi-
tively communicating a sense of new hybrid system of work for transforming
world. He empowered his employees to examine the market critically and de-
velop innovative ideas and hence increase creativity. Therefore, Nadella is an
authentic leader who has changed the Microsoft’s phase from status quo to ac-
celerated rate and fulfils the four component of Authentic Leadership theory
(Walumbwa et al., 2008).
The word query tool (word query, treemap and cluster analysis) depicts Nadella’s
personality as Microsoft’s CEO and sentiment analysis of #SatyaNadella reports
a majorly positive opinion of the tweets. The traits of Nadella are found to be
linked with four components of authentic leadership. The challenges and ap-
proaches adopted by Nadella in Microsoft lays down benchmarks for other po-
tential leaders present and to come in the future.

5. Implications
As a leader, Nadella promoted employee innovation and creativity that enhanced
Microsoft’s performance. It has been suggested that creativity increases when
fair decision making and analysing the character of leader increases (Oke et al.,
2009). Nadella’s approach of “Never Say NO” and supportive style for empow-

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D. Prakash et al.

erment has increased Microsoft’s ranking in terms of Revenue and Total Assets
(Table 1). This style incidents that an integrated culture should be provided that
can help followers to explain their own ideas and decisions that may develop
creativity. This study suggests that authentic leadership style is very conducive to
the creation of a good team atmosphere of psychological safety and trust which
in turn facilitates employee willingness and creativity. It is also suggested that a
leader promote an atmosphere of respect, admiration, participation, support,
and involvement for his/her employees from diverse backgrounds to enhance
the commitment and creativity. Nadella embraces diversity culture by putting
the hands up for the campaign “Black Lives Matter” that has acknowledged him
as the “Best CEOs for Diversity 2020” reported by Comparably (2020). So, the
above-mentioned dimensions provide a base to Nadella’s visionary leadership,
making it possible for Microsoft to become the world’s fourth most valuable
company globally (Fox, 2019). The unique vision and farsightedness of Nadella,
being an authentic leader and the journey of transformation of Microsoft has
provided crucial lessons that can be learned by fellow IT giants such as Face-
book, Google and Apple.
The findings of the analysis indicate some practical contributiosn from inte-
grated Nadella-authentic leadership style that has developed a culture of innova-
tion and creativity. First, leaders should give followers the choice of thinking and
behaviour. Second, they should motivate and encourage trust for building posi-
tive interpersonal relationship that can promote creativity. Third, freedom and
opportunity should be provided to followers to express their opinion and ideas.
Fourth, a leader should promote integrity, honesty and discourage unethical be-
haviours that lead to positive climate and trust and therefore creativity. Fifth,
develop an emotional attachment among followers towards their organisation.
Sixth, he should focus on collaboration, learning, empowerment, positivity, em-
pathy and growth of employees. Lastly, develop opportunity of voice to be heard
and a good communication channel should be integrated to develop a culture of
trust that can promote creativity. Hence, these suggestions can help leaders to
polish and develop their leadership skills and organisation performance. These
suggestions are applicable not only to IT giants but also to any other business in
21st century.

6. Conclusion
This study makes significant contributions by displaying how Nadella skills con-
tribute to employee innovation through creativity. This study highlights rela-
tionship between Nadella’s skills and Authentic Leadership dimensions of self-
awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing and an internalized
moral perspective. These dimensions are quite important as they encourage em-
ployees’ positive attitudes and behaviours (i.e., affective commitment and crea-
tivity). In this study we have tried to analyze these dimensions with Nadella’s vi-
sionary leadership of authenticity. Identification of sentiments associated with

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 D. Prakash et al.

#SatyaNadella is obtained using NCapture from Twiter. The tweets mainly were
neutral and positive. The study also signifies that the traits of Nadella are linked
with authentic leadership style with the help of his interviews and decisions
taken by Nadella since 2014 (Table 3). The study further discusses the implica-
tions for the fellow competitor’s IT giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google
to learn lessons from the “Transformation of Microsoft” for smooth cultural change
and accelerating profits over the years (Sharma, 2020).

Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this pa-
per.

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DOI: 10.4236/ojl.2021.102007 109 Open Journal of Leadership