There is an emerging consensus that traditional management roles could—and maybe should—be performed by machines infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet, “true” leadership—that is, motivating and enabling people so that they can and will contribute to the collective goals of an organization—is still predominantly viewed as the prerogative of humans. With our opinion piece, we challenge this perspective. Our essay aims to be a wake-up call for large parts of academia and practice that romanticize human leadership and think that this bastion can never be overtaken by AI. We delineate why algorithms will not (need to) come to a halt before core characteristics of leadership and potentially cater better to employees’ psychological needs than human leaders. Against this background, conscious choices need to be made about what role humans are to play in the future of leadership. These considerations hold significant implications for the future of not only leadership research but also leadership education and development.

Interdependence is a fundamental characteristic of social interactions. Interdependence Theory states that 6 dimensions describe differences between social situations. Here we examine if these 6 dimensions describe how people think about their interdependence with others in a situation. We find that people (in situ and ex situ) can reliably differentiate situations according to 5, but not 6, dimensions of interdependence: (a) mutual dependence, (b) power, (c) conflict, (d) future interdependence, and (e) information certainty. This model offers a unique framework for understanding how people think about social situations compared to another recent model of situation construal (DIAMONDS). Furthermore, we examine factors that are theorized to shape perceptions of interdependence, such as situational cues (e.g., nonverbal behavior) and personality (e.g., HEXACO and Social Value Orientation). We also study the implications of subjective interdependence for emotions and cooperative behavior during social interactions. This model of subjective interdependence explains substantial variation in the emotions people experience in situations (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and disgust), and explains 24% of the variance in cooperation, above and beyond the DIAMONDS model. Throughout these studies, we develop and validate a multidimensional measure of subjective outcome interdependence that can be used in diverse situations and relationships-the Situational Interdependence Scale (SIS). We discuss how this model of interdependence can be used to better understand how people think about social situations encountered in close relationships, organizations, and society. (PsycINFO Database Record

Knowledge sharing is a discretionary act of employees who might see benefits in keeping their knowledge to themselves. We focus on the other-oriented nature of knowledge sharing to outline how respectful leadership as an other-oriented leadership style can enhance followers’ knowledge sharing through its effect on followers’ other-orientedness. Specifically, we propose that respectful leaders increase followers’ social mindfulness—defined as the cognitive (i.e. perspective taking) and affective (i.e. empathic concern) willingness to behave in a way that increases others’ opportunities—which facilitates knowledge sharing. To test our conceptual model, we conducted a three-wave field study with 275 followers, and a multi-source field study with 83 leader-follower dyads. In line with our hypotheses, followers’ perspective taking (Study 1 and 2) and empathic concern (Study 1) mediated the positive effect of respectful leadership on followers’ knowledge sharing. Moreover, perspective taking and empathic concern possessed interactive effects in Study 1, suggesting that the relationship between respectful leadership and followers’ knowledge sharing was strongest when both components of social mindfulness were high. We discuss theoretical implications of the identified motivational pathway and elaborate on implications for practitioners who aim to facilitate knowledge sharing at work.

Despite the proliferation of research on ethical leadership, there remains a limited understanding of how specifically the assumingly moral component of this leadership style affects employee behavior. Taking an identity perspective, we integrate the ethical leadership literature with research on the dynamics of the moral self-concept to posit that ethical leadership will foster a sense of moral identity among employees, which then inspires followers to adopt more ethical actions, such as increased organization citizenship behavior (OCB). We further argue that these identity effects should be more pronounced when leaders are perceived to be group prototypical, as their actions then speak louder to followers’ sense of identity. Two studies—a scenario experiment with 138 participants and a field study with 225 employees—provided support for our hypothesized moderated mediation model. Perceived ethical leadership positively affected OCB via followers’ moral identity but only under conditions of high perceived leader group prototypicality. We discuss how the identity pathway of ethical leadership can facilitate novel theorizing about moral transference. Our findings also suggest that, when hiring external ethical leaders or training internal managers, practitioners are well advised to consider that these individuals may only be effective in morally transforming followers when they are perceived as prototypical for the group.

Emergent leadership—the ascription of informal leadership responsibilities among team members—is a dynamic phenomenon that comes into place through social interactions. Yet, theory remains sparse about the importance of verbal behaviors for emergent leadership in self-managed teams over a team’s lifecycle. Adopting a functional perspective on leadership, we develop a temporal account that links changes in task-, change-, and relations-oriented communication to emergent leadership in early, middle, and late team phases. We test the hypothesized relationships in 42 teams that provided round-robin emergent leadership ratings and videotapes of their first, midterm, and final meetings. Team members’ verbal behaviors were captured using fine-grained empirical interaction coding. Multilevel modeling showed that task-oriented communication was a stable positive predictor of emergent leadership at all time points. Change-oriented communication predicted emergent leadership at the start of the project and diminishe...