AI-Augmented Leadership and Employee Voice Behaviour: Exploring the Roles of Trust and Empowerment

Abstract

As organisations increasingly embed artificial intelligence (AI) into the routines of leadership, from predictive performance dashboards to AI-assisted feedback and coaching tools, a pressing but underexamined question is how this technological augmentation of leadership shapes employees' willingness to speak up. This paper develops and defends a conceptual model in which AI-augmented leadership predicts employee voice behaviour through two theoretically distinct but interlocking psychological mechanisms: trust in the combined leader-AI system, and psychological empowerment. Drawing on social exchange theory) the integrative model of organisational trust, Spreitzer's theory of psychological empowerment, and the growing empirical literature on trust in artificial intelligence, the paper argues that AI-augmented leadership is neither inherently emancipatory nor inherently silencing; its consequences for voice depend on whether it is experienced by employees as a resource that expands judgement and relational engagement or as a mechanism of algorithmic control that narrows it. The paper further situates trust and empowerment within the longer-standing voice literature on psychological safety and implicit theories of self-censorship, showing how these established constructs sharpen, rather than duplicate, the proposed model. Five research propositions are advanced, a boundary condition involving AI transparency is specified, and a research agenda for empirically testing the model is outlined. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on AI and leadership by reframing the central question from whether AI replaces leaders to how leaders' use of AI is interpreted by employees, and by clarifying the specific psychological pathways through which that interpretation either encourages or forecloses constructive dissent.