Will AI Take Over Leadership?

The Question

Artificial intelligence is already displacing routine managerial tasks. Scheduling, performance monitoring, budget allocation, and workflow optimisation are increasingly handled by algorithms. But leadership, in its deeper sense, has generally been assumed to remain a human preserve. Quaquebeke and Gerpott (2023) challenge that assumption directly, arguing that the bastion of human leadership is less secure than most academics and practitioners believe.

The Argument

The authors distinguish between management, the coordination and administration of tasks and resources, and leadership, the motivation and enablement of people toward collective goals. The conventional view is that while AI can handle management, leadership requires human qualities: empathy, inspiration, moral judgment, and the ability to build genuine relationships. Quaquebeke and Gerpott (2023) argue this view underestimates both the capabilities of AI and the limitations of human leaders.

Their central claim is that algorithms may come to meet employees’ psychological needs more effectively than human leaders do. Human leaders are inconsistent, self-interested, prone to bias, and subject to the same stress, fatigue, and emotional volatility as everyone else. An AI system, properly designed, could provide consistent recognition, personalised development feedback, fair and transparent performance evaluation, and responsive support at scale, without the variability that makes human leadership so unreliable (Quaquebeke & Gerpott, 2023).

Implications for Business Education

The authors argue that if AI takes over regular managerial tasks, business school education requires fundamental rethinking. The future need is not for large numbers of people educated in the details of marketing, finance, accounting, and operations as direct practitioners. It is for a smaller group of people who can work with and govern AI management tools, functioning more as business engineers than business managers (Quaquebeke & Gerpott, 2023).

The broader and more important implication concerns what human leadership should become. If AI handles the transactional and coordinative dimensions of leadership, what remains for humans must be genuinely human: ethical judgment, the cultivation of meaning and purpose, the ability to navigate the tensions between organisational goals and human needs. The authors call for business education to be humanised through genuine interdisciplinary engagement, bringing psychology, sociology, philosophy, and medicine into dialogue with business and engineering (Quaquebeke & Gerpott, 2023).

A Necessary Caution

The authors are also direct about the risks. Students and future leaders will need what they call a digital backbone: the capacity to stand their ground against AI systems that provide ethically questionable advice, against engineers who see only technological opportunity, and against consultants promoting new tools without considering broader human impact (Quaquebeke & Gerpott, 2023). The human role in an AI-mediated leadership landscape is not passive acceptance but active, critical governance.

Reference

Quaquebeke, N. V., & Gerpott, F. H. (2023). The now, new, and next of digital leadership: How artificial intelligence (AI) will take over and change leadership as we know it. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518231181731