Mediated authenticity: How school principals enact leadership under conditions of accountability, transparency, and trust

This qualitative interpretive study examines how school principals enact authenticity under conditions of accountability, transparency, trust, and organizational complexity. Drawing on 48 interviews with Jewish Israeli public-school principals, the article argues that authenticity is not best understood as unrestricted candor, complete transparency, or the possession of personal traits. Rather, principals described authenticity as a mediated organizational accomplishment enacted through recognizable congruence between values and action, bounded openness, relational presence, consultation without abdication, and the translation of external demands into educationally defensible forms. Corrective and boundary cases show that unmediated candor can undermine trust, intensify anxiety, or blur role responsibility. The article advances mediated authenticity and distinguishes it from dramaturgical self-presentation, authentic leadership enactment, buffering, and moral leadership. It contributes to educational leadership scholarship by relocating authenticity from leader disposition to situated organizational practice, and by showing why principal preparation should treat authenticity as judgment, translation, and responsible communication under organizational constraint.