Ethical Leadership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69971/dss.2.2.2025.45Keywords:
ethical leadership, artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, responsible AI, organizational ethics, digital leadershipAbstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged in organizational settings at a swift pace, fundamentally reshaping the comprehension of ethical leadership. The study, called a systematic literature review, analyzed 87 peer-reviewed studies that were published in the period from 2018 to 2025, to see how AI technologies transform the roles, resources and ethical landscape of organizational leaders. Algorithmic decision-making, automated surveillance and AI-enhanced governance are transforming the existing discourse on ethical leadership – whether that's transformational leadership, servant leadership, or authentic leadership – and we take a look at how they're doing it in this article based on the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. The five thematic clusters we identified are: (1) shifting the moral responsibility for AI from humans to AI systems, (2) algorithmic bias as an ethical leadership problem, (3) transparency and explainability in securing trust of AI system leadership, (4) data governance and data privacy as leadership needs, and (5) building new ethical leadership skills for AI. We suggest an integrative theory, the Responsible AI Leadership Model (RAILM), to combine themes and provide directions for empirical studies in the future.
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