Research

Research on digital leadership and AI

I study how digital technologies change leadership and collaboration. This section presents published work, its evidence base and its relevance to questions organisations face.

How it started

A discussion at the kitchen table, shortly before Christmas 2021

Corona pandemic, the second winter. My father – authorised officer, head of sales and head of private clients at Volksbank Rhein-Nahe-Hunsrück eG, about five years away from retirement at the time – suddenly had to lead people who were no longer in the branches but working from home. None of it was planned. His complaints did not take long: it was no longer what it used to be. Working from home was inefficient, unproductive. Simply no good.

I was sceptical whether the problem really lay with the place of work. My suspicion was that it had more to do with leadership, but that was a hunch and not an answer. So I set out to find what makes a good leader in exactly this setting and where things actually go wrong. The question at the kitchen table became a doctoral project.

In the end it turned into a bigger question than the one about working from home. It became the question of what happens to leadership when technology comes between people. First video conferencing such as Zoom, then online collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, and finally advanced digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) or metaverse applications. And ultimately the question: what remains the human’s task, despite all the technological support available?

The answers to these questions will follow after the defence of the dissertation.

Doctorate

Digitalisation of Team Leadership

How digitalisation is changing the challenges, behaviours and traits of leaders of virtual teams, including the opportunities and limitations of advanced digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), as well as metaverse applications. Five studies, two systematic literature reviews, 61 interviews.

Status: Dissertation submitted · September 2026 · Defence expected December 2026
Title: Digitalisierung der Teamführung: E-Leadership virtueller Teams unter Berücksichtigung führungsrelevanter Herausforderungen, Eigenschaften und Verhaltensweisen sowie der Affordanzen und Limitierungen fortschrittlicher digitaler Technologien (Digitalisation of team leadership: e-leadership of virtual teams considering the related challenges, traits and behaviours of leaders as well as the affordances and limitations of advanced digital technologies)
Setting: Dr. rer. pol., Wirtschaftsinformatik · University of Koblenz, Faculty of Computer Science · Doctoral advisor and first examiner: Prof. Dr. Harald F.O. von Korflesch · Second examiner: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Jeanine Kirchner-Krath

Digital LeadershipVirtual TeamsAIOrganisational BehaviourFuture of Work

Unpublished results will appear after the defence.

Further research questions

Where does leading virtual teams actually get hard?

Published (Springer, 2025; ISPC 2024): 36 executives from 33 large German companies described 37 challenges at individual, team and organisational level — from reading non-verbal signals on screen to structuring availability and building relationships at a distance.

Which leader traits matter in virtual contexts?

Published (ECIS, 2022): a systematic review of e-leader traits — the classic ones still count; adaptability, cultural, social and emotional intelligence, and change, coaching and trust-building skills gain weight.

What do leaders of virtual teams actually do differently?

The behavioural study behind this question is part of the dissertation. Results follow after the defence.

What can AI, VR/AR and metaverse tools do for leaders — and under which conditions?

25 experts with leadership and technology experience assessed 24 leadership functions. The findings are part of the dissertation and will be published after the defence.

What does this mean for organisations introducing AI into managerial work?

That is the question I want to answer in practice — in transformation, AI-adoption and change roles — with the evidence base described above.

Evidence base

Where the findings come from

61interviews in total

36executives from 33 large enterprises (including 10 C-level)

25experts with leadership and technology experience

59publications in two systematic literature reviews

4published and accepted papers

Published and accepted papers

Four papers – and what they mean in practice

AI Can Plan, But Can It Inspire? A Qualitative Analysis of Benefits and Limitations of AI in Leadership

Friesenhahn, Pauken, Tuschner, Kirchner-Krath · Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Conference: HICSS-60 (2027)
Status: Accepted · not yet published

Research question: Which leadership tasks can AI support and where are its limits?

Evidence: 15 interviews with leaders who use AI tools regularly in their leadership work, analysed along the 15 leadership functions of the team leadership taxonomy by Morgeson et al. (2010).

Key finding: Benefits and limitations of AI follow a clear pattern. AI strongly supports transactional tasks such as composing the team, setting goals, planning, monitoring, providing resources and administrative team work. It reaches its limits where leadership creates meaning, builds shared commitment, mediates between people or sustains the social climate. Two dynamics stand out. The first is a transparency paradox, because AI-driven performance assessment is more objective yet can be experienced as unfair and erode trust. The second is a role shift paradox, because when AI takes over transactional work it frees capacity for transformational leadership.

Practical relevance: For AI adoption in leadership processes this means starting with transactional functions, where efficiency gains are most likely to outweigh adoption costs. Transformational tasks stay with the leader, and AI contributes drafts at most, under explicit human review. The freed capacity should be deliberately reinvested in mission, sensemaking and climate rather than absorbed as time savings. AI-supported assessments also need appeal channels and explainability so that data transparency does not erode trust. As with any interview study, these are perceptions of early adopters, not measured effects.

Leading Virtual Teams in the Context of e-Leadership: Insights into Challenges from Leaders’ Perspectives

Tuschner, Hörsch, Lorenz, von Korflesch · Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics

Conference: ISPC 2024
Status: Published 2025

Research question: Where exactly does leading virtual teams become difficult when you ask the leaders themselves?

Evidence: 36 interviews with leaders from 33 large German enterprises, conducted between January and June 2022, from first-line to top management, including ten C-level executives from DAX-listed companies. Analysed with thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke, with the coding checked independently by two authors.

Published finding: The leaders described challenges in ten themes on three levels. On the individual level, non-verbal cues are missing, trust and empathy have to develop at a distance, new team members are harder to integrate, the working day breaks up into tightly scheduled video calls, and the temptation to micromanage grows. On the team level, meeting size, time zones, age structure and the home workspace matter, on the organisational level job profiles, internal rules, the degree of digitalisation, poorly integrated tools and legal requirements. Little attention had been paid so far to proximity bias, the unconscious preference for those one sees in person, as well as to onboarding and the moderation of virtual meetings.

Practical relevance: The list serves as a diagnostic grid for leadership development and for collaboration in virtual and hybrid teams. It shows where leaders need concrete support, for instance in moderating virtual meetings, in onboarding at a distance or in dealing consciously with proximity bias. Organisations can use it to target training, rules for collaboration and technical equipment. These are perceptions from large German enterprises during the pandemic, not proven impact in a specific organisation.

Source

Leading in the Digital Age: A Systematic Review on Leader Traits in the Context of e-Leadership

Tuschner, Krath, Bings, Schwenkmezger, Etzkorn, von Korflesch · European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS)

Best Paper Nominee · ECIS 2022

Conference: ECIS 2022
Status: Published 2022

Research question: Which traits become more important when leadership moves into digital environments?

Evidence: Systematic literature review of 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2001 and 2021, searched in July 2021 in Web of Science, EBSCO and SpringerLink. The traits mentioned were coded inductively and then classified into stable attributes such as personality, cognitive abilities, motives and core beliefs, and into learnable skills.

Published finding: Classic leader traits still count in digital settings, but the weight shifts. Adaptability and willingness to take risks are mentioned most often, while extraversion and conscientiousness no longer appear at all. Cultural, social and emotional intelligence are in higher demand than general intelligence. Among the learnable skills, communication, technology and motivation lead the list, and trust-building, coaching and change management turn out to be typical of digital leadership. Because the research focus lies on learnable skills, no new type of leader is needed. The necessary skills can be developed.

Practical relevance: For recruitment, the profile offers a template for looking specifically at these attributes when selecting leaders for distributed teams. For leadership development, it means not limiting programmes to tool training but explicitly training trust-building, coaching and change management in hybrid work. The review reflects the state of peer-reviewed research, not the experience of a specific company.

Source

A Reference Model for Organizing Responsibilities in the Smart Factory

Etzkorn, Tuschner, Krauss, von Korflesch · Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics

Conference: ISPC 2023
Status: Published 2024

Research question: Who is responsible for what in the connected factory when systems help prepare decisions?

Evidence: Inductive reference modelling following Fettke in five steps. The basis is the organisational models of five manufacturing companies, two process manufacturers, two international discrete manufacturers and one medium-sized business, with 900 to 673,000 employees. The taxonomy by Tao and Qi provided the structure for assets and services.

Published finding: The result is a matrix that assigns the responsible company function to each asset and service of the smart factory, 14 functions in total, from corporate IT and plants and engineering to data and analytics. IT plays a central role in organising the smart factory, but the services around the production process itself remain with the OT functions. What stands out is the opposite direction. It is not classic IT reaching into OT, but new functions for digital operational technology such as OT security and smart operations that grow into the classic IT domain. Information services turn out to be support services for which only IT and administrative functions are responsible.

Practical relevance: The model is a template that companies can use to design responsibilities for their digitalised production or to review their existing organisation. Whoever brings systems onto the factory floor clarifies beforehand who is responsible for operation, data and security, and deliberately sets up new OT-related roles instead of letting them emerge between IT and production. The model is based on five companies and is meant as a starting point, not as a blueprint for every factory.

Source

Three published papers; one further paper accepted for HICSS-60 (2027).

Unpublished results of the dissertation are deliberately not shown here until the defence and publication. Published papers are linked above.

All publications:Google Scholar ResearchGate

Interested in a conversation?

I am available from February 2027. I welcome conversations about roles in digital transformation, AI adoption and organisational change – on site, hybrid or remote. You can reach me by email or on LinkedIn.

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