Data privacy, ethics and strategic leadership

In this chapter, the authors discuss the role of strategic leaders in taking an ethical approach to artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in order to address the privacy challenges faced by strategic leaders in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Integrating moral judgment and integrated social contract theories, they provide a multi-level, pragmatic framework by which organizations and their managers might develop moral judgments and shared norms with employees and customers in the use of big data and AI. Taking into account the privacy expectations of these stakeholders, as well as the roles of organizations as either creators or users of big data and AI, their framework provides an understanding of the expectations inherent in the implicit social contract between an organization and its stakeholders and the ways leaders can avoid both amoral and immoral practices with effective moral management.