Measuring AI Leadership in AI-Native Organizations

Summary

Researchers have developed and validated the AI Leadership Battery, a measurement instrument for leadership behaviors in AI-enabled work. The project addresses a gap in existing measures, which the authors say do not capture the specific behaviors leaders must use as AI changes how they judge, explain, learn, and coordinate. The Battery organizes 36 behaviorally specific subdimensions into 11 theory-specified content families. Its development followed established scale-development procedures, including deductive item generation, content validation, exploratory factor analysis, item reduction, and confirmatory factor analysis using independent samples. Additional analyses examined internal consistency reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, as well as criterion-related and incremental validity. Across the development and validation studies, the results supported the measure’s content, multidimensional structure, reliability, and distinction from selected related constructs. The Battery also added information beyond those constructs across organizational growth, decision speed, customer and stakeholder response capability, AI-enabled team performance, AI-enabled work experience, AI security and risk management, and AI adoption and integration. The authors present the resulting measure as a behavioral framework for examining how leaders regulate judgment, learning, adaptation, transparency, and accountability in AI-enabled organizations.