STUDENT NUMBER: 13232672
ASSIGNMENT 1 – ACADEMIC JOURNAL REVIEW
DUE: WEEK 11, FRIDAY 13th DECEMBER 2013
LENGTH: 1356. (-10%)

Behaving in an authentic manner is essential for employees when working in an organisation, if a member of staff has no interest in a certain area of work, the employee wouldn’t show commitment or contribution. This article outlines the influence organisations have on employees and how they believe their authentic work has an alignment with their identity. The article is also based on a case study which includes two public sector organisations undertaking a merger.
Working in an authentic manner will make staff feel as if they are being themselves at work rather than being someone they are not. Therefore, it is important for employees to enjoy what they are doing at work rather than being enjoined to run errands. The purpose of this article is to prove that the possibility of employees working authentically would mean that they would need to have a passion for their working area.
When working authentically it would mean putting in extra time and allowing yourself to enhance your personal skills and adjust changes to a specific task given shows the level of increase in achieving higher performance. Being energetic and contributing towards tasks given would depend on how authentic the employee is towards their work. In other words if the employee makes their job their top priority and shows a high level of appreciation for their job, they would succeed highly in their department area. They would also need to take it into full consideration as a meaningful concept within their life and not only as just a “job” the employee tends to have a positive outcome due to the commitment, self-motivation and admire they input towards their job.
The articles is used to illustrate how a change in an organisation may impact the authentic behaviour of employees, the authentic change consists of both experiential and behavioural concepts of authenticity. When undertaking authentic work it is believed that people behave in a way of expressing themselves by sharing their thoughts and values towards their work.
The core issues being raised are “how profound organisational change may impact employees’ abilities to work in an authentic manner”. (Kira, Balkin & San, 2012, p1) the issues that are raised in this article involves the core impact of how employees work in an authentic way. The article may be interesting to the human resource management team in every organisation across the nation. It would also engage employers, shareholders who are currently thinking of undertaking an organisational change/merger.
The article raises the issues of authentic behaviour and how it may create (mis)alignments between work and identity on two levels. (Kira, Balkin & San, 2012, p3) the author focuses thoroughly on answering the question of how organisational will impact authentic behaviour, and if it is really true that employees work best in their department of interest. It is sending out a message to all organisations who may or may not be thinking about merging, when organisations merge they have to go through another recruiting process in order to place employees in areas they work in best. When the merge takes place a group of employees are asked to a work in a department which they may not have passion for, this would then have an effect on the alignment between an employee’s present work identity and the experienced reality of work may be lost. (Eilam and Shamir, 2005; Ibarra and barbulescu, 2010 cited in Kira, Balkin & San, 2012, p4)
The concept of this article mainly revolves around the inauthentic and authentic behaviour of employees. The author gathers a various amount of information from different resources in order to answer the questions which are being raised. The article emphasis on how behaving authentically at work relates to having ‘self-knowledge and