Systemically Mediated Leadership in AI-Enabled Organizations: A Socio-Technical Systems Theory of Distributed Judgment, Feedback, and Accountability
TL;DR
A socio-technical systems theory of systemically mediated leadership is developed, defined as a nested system-level condition and recurrent process configuration through which human actors, AI systems, organizational routines, governance institutions, and affected stakeholders jointly produce and revise direction, meaning, consequential judgment, legitimacy, and accountability through recursive feedback.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediates leadership-relevant judgment through models, dashboards, metrics, decision-support systems, and autonomous agents. This conceptual article develops a socio-technical systems theory of systemically mediated leadership, defined as a nested system-level condition and recurrent process configuration through which human actors, AI systems, organizational routines, governance institutions, and affected stakeholders jointly produce and revise direction, meaning, consequential judgment, legitimacy, and accountability through recursive feedback. A problem-driven conceptual synthesis was updated through 3 August 2026. A structured discovery pass yielded 97 candidate records; 85 sources were retained after relevance screening, citation chaining, concept mapping, and comparison of eight candidate mechanism families. Four proposed qualification conditions jointly define the construct within the present framework: AI mediation, leadership relevance, distributed judgment, and recurrent institutional embedding. Five mechanism families explain transformations in responsibility, legitimacy, control, attention, and feedback timing: moral delegation, interpretive laundering, ceremonial oversight, metric-driven sensemaking, and ethical latency. A causal-loop model specifies justificatory reinforcement, capability atrophy, power insulation, and accountable correction. Their relative dominance produces three ideal-type dynamic regimes: accountable adaptation, stabilized trade-offs, and destructive drift. The theory predicts that organizations using equally accurate models may produce divergent leadership and accountability outcomes because their feedback, power, and oversight architectures differ. Responsible AI leadership thus depends on system architecture and contestable institutional practice, not leader intention, formal human approval, or model accuracy alone.