Authentic leadership is becoming a prevalent focus area for new thinking in leadership after the colossal corporate failures in leadership experienced at the beginning of this century. To this end, authenticity in leadership has been proposed as the fundamental root construct of all positive psychology-based forms of leadership such as transformational and servant. This study proposes that authenticity is constitutive to all effective antecedents to leadership, follower-ship, and highly effective teams. As such, authenticity is a hegemonic core construct that is foundational to what makes humans, and ultimately entire organizations, sustainable in their effectiveness. Increasing authenticity within leaders fosters increasing effectiveness of followers through modeling as well increased states of trust between the leader and follower. Trust, in this sense, is the lubrication for all highly effective systems of human activities whatever they might be.