Next Generation Leadership: The Rise of the Robot Servant-Leaders?

Abstract

People have always dreamed of a selfless servant, a machine that serves humans (Domaine, 2008; Mayor, 2020), a helper who frees people from heavy labor. This dream has inspired the common notion and understanding of the role which robots take in our society: The robot is humans’ servant. The origin of the English word robot lies in the Czech word robota, which can be translated as “servitude” or “compulsory labor”, describing the compulsory service in the context of a feudal system (Launius & McCurdy, 2012). Technological change progressed rapidly in the last few decades (Avadikyan et al., 2016). We have become accustomed to the role of the robot as a loyal servant (Helper et al., 2018). Today, machines autonomously mow our lawns, construct cars or even transport people in self-driving trains or buses. In order to regulate the coexistence between robots and humans, Isaac Asimov (2004) established three basic rules. Rule number 2 of his catalog corresponds to the notion of the robot as a servant of humans, “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings.” But is Asimov’s principle still universally valid today? Now, in an ever-increasing number of cases, the principle seems to be reversed. Our research objective is to explore the theoretical feasibility of servant-leadership through machines. We deliberately choose the term robot leadership because we not only analyze AI Leadership, but also conventionally programmed Leadership software/programs. In other words, we examine whether machines may completely replace humans as servant-leaders. To summarize we can say that the core question of our paper is whether robots/machines can be programmed to lead not only transactionally but also in an inspirational and servant-led way.