Source: He et al. (2026) — “The Dark Side of Managing Human-AI Collaborations: Implications for Leaders’ Moral Relativism and Unethical Behaviour,” Journal of Management Studies
Most human-AI collaboration papers are optimistic.
Humans bring judgment. AI brings speed. Everyone collaborates beautifully. Productivity rises. Somewhere, a consultant creates a framework with three circles.
This paper is interested in the darker side.
It asks what managing human-AI collaboration does to leaders themselves. The argument is uncomfortable: when leaders manage work split between humans and AI, they may become more morally relativistic, which can increase unethical behaviour.
That sounds dramatic, but I can see the logic.
AI creates distance. Decisions feel more technical. Responsibility becomes easier to blur. If a recommendation came from a system, a dashboard, or a model, leaders may start treating moral choices as more flexible. Not evil, necessarily. Just slightly easier to rationalise.
That is how many ethical problems begin.
The scary part is that this can look like professionalism from the outside. The leader is not emotional. The process is data-driven. The decision has documentation. Lovely. Except the moral weight may have quietly slipped out of view.
Not with someone announcing, “Today I will behave badly.” More often, it starts with ambiguity. The system suggested it. The metric required it. The process allowed it. The human becomes the manager of a machine-mediated decision and quietly feels less personally responsible.
Very convenient. Very dangerous.
The paper also points to individual differences, such as leaders’ need for cognitive closure. Some leaders may be more vulnerable when AI makes messy decisions feel neatly packaged.
My takeaway: AI governance is not only about controlling the system. It is also about watching what the system does to human decision-makers. Leaders need ethical guardrails, not just AI dashboards. Otherwise, collaboration with AI may not remove human weakness. It may simply give it better cover.