<p>Authentic leadership has become one of the most widely studied leadership constructs of the past two decades, celebrated for its alignment with ethical leadership and personal integrity. Yet in recent years, the concept has come under sustained critique for its conceptual ambiguity, moral idealism, and questionable theoretical foundations. This paper addresses the resulting tension with a critical interpretive analysis and theoretical reframing. An analysis of forty-five empirical studies published in 2024 or 2025 shows how the field has variously neglected, incorporated, or reinterpreted critique. The review reveals persistent methodological habits and conceptual elasticity, with many studies continuing to treat authentic leadership as a stable leader attribute despite mounting challenges to this assumption. In response, the paper advances a reconceptualisation of authentic leadership as a socially constructed, follower-centred attribution rather than an intrinsic quality of leaders. This reframing helps explain the construct’s empirical resilience, showing that its appeal lies less in ontological clarity than in its symbolic and relational resonance for followers. The paper contributes to leadership theory by explaining the construct’s persistence, synthesising its critical tensions, and proposing a redirection of future research toward meaning-making, followership, and relational judgement.</p>