Young Professionals’ Developmental Life Attributes, Authentic Leadership and Socioeconomic Outcomes in Mass Media Firms in Nairobi City County Kenya

Abstract

Questionable professionalism and objectivity in media outlets significantly challenge their authenticity, a critical ethical issue underscored by statistics suggesting over 50% of young industry professionals have participated in corruption. This study investigated how authentic leadership derived from psychological and sociological developmental life attributes predicts socioeconomic outcomes among young professionals in the mass media in Nairobi County and how that prediction would be affected by critical life events. Multidisciplinary theories from the behavioral sciences and organizational studies guided the study, which adopted a pragmatic philosophy alongside a convergent mixed-methods research design. The population was drawn from 144 mass media TV stations, from which a sample of 217 respondents was selected via a stratified sampling technique. Data was obtained using structured questionnaires and interview guides, achieving a response rate of 57.5% for quantitative data and 92% for qualitative data. Diagnostic tests confirmed the questionnaire's reliability with a Cronbach alpha score of $\alpha = 0.919$, while qualitative themes successfully resonated with the investigated constructs. Descriptive statistics indicated high perceived importance for psychological and sociological developmental attributes, with mean scores of 4.2 and 3.6, respectively. Authentic leadership registered a mean score of 4.0, while socioeconomic outcomes ranged between 3.4 and 3.6. Childhood and adulthood critical life events scored means of 3.6 and 3.4, respectively, with diagnostic tests confirming that no multiple regression assumptions were violated. Inferential analysis demonstrated that psychological and sociological developmental attributes explain the variation in authenticity to a relatively high, positive level. Furthermore, authentic leadership derived from these attributes positively predicts socioeconomic outcomes in varying degrees across the sampled TV stations. Crucially, childhood critical life events strengthen the contribution of developmental attributes toward authenticity formation, enhancing its overall explanatory power. Conversely, while adulthood critical life events strengthened the contribution of authenticity towards socioeconomic outcomes, its presence registers a decline in its overall explanatory power. Ultimately, these findings demystify the existing logic on the source of authenticity and validate developmental life attributes as key antecedents of authentic leadership and its socioeconomic outcomes. The study calls on media managers to institute appropriate Human Resource Management (HRM) practices that leverage these developmental life attributes and critical life events. Finally, the study calls on future research to consider expanding the scope of indicators to the study constructs, adopt more robust statistical techniques, and investigate the same phenomenon in a wider context that takes anational scope.