Abstract:

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into organisational life has begun to reshape how leadership is enacted, learned, and developed. While early research framed AI primarily as an efficiency-enhancing tool, recent scholarship increasingly positions generative AI as a cognitive collaborator capable of influencing sensemaking, creativity, and decision-making. This paper critically examines AI-enabled leadership development for innovative practice, drawing on empirical evidence from a doctoral study in which twelve leaders engaged with a conversational generative AI system as part of a structured developmental intervention (Harper, 2025). Using a Grounded Ethnography design combined with Grounded Theory analysis, the study explored how leaders interacted with AI to reflect on leadership dilemmas, rehearse skills, and generate alternative approaches to complex organisational challenges.

The findings suggest that AI can function as a form of cognitive augmentation, reflective dialogue partner, and low-risk simulation environment, particularly supporting leadership capabilities associated with innovation, including problem framing, change leadership, conflict management, and adaptive communication. Leaders reported increased clarity, metacognitive awareness, and creative confidence. However, the study also surfaced substantial concerns relating to epistemic reliability, algorithmic bias, authenticity, ethical responsibility, and the risk of over-reliance. These tensions mirror contemporary debates in the AI, leadership, and innovation literatures between augmentation and substitution, creativity and conformity, and efficiency and ethics.

Integrating the empirical findings with a substantially expanded body of current literature, this paper develops a critically informed conceptual model of AI-Enabled Leadership Development for Innovative Practice. The model frames leadership development as an iterative human/ AI learning process shaped by cognitive augmentation, reflective sensemaking, skill rehearsal, innovative application, and ethical governance. The paper contributes to leadership development scholarship by offering one of the most empirically grounded and theoretically synthesised accounts to date of how generative AI can support innovative leadership practice while preserving human judgement, relational authenticity, and ethical accountability.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Strategy

Keywords: strategy;strategic change;organizational strategy;resources and capabilities

Menu

Dr. Jennifer Harper