Technology-mediated organizing increasingly redistributes decision activity, visibility, expertise, and control across managers, employees, and computational systems. Yet prevailing debates often separate responsible leadership, algorithmic accountability, worker inclusion, and human-centered design, leaving organizations without a coherent conceptual account of what leadership responsibility means when consequential work is technologically mediated. This Original Conceptual Framework Article develops a proposed Responsible-Leadership Framework that integrates four governance obligations: ethical orientation, retained accountability, consequential inclusion, and human-centered governance. The framework treats technological capability as distinct from legitimate authority, delegation as distinct from responsibility transfer, formal participation as distinct from consequential influence, and nominal human oversight as distinct from substantively informed review. It further proposes a governance lifecycle linking authorization, configuration, delegation and use, review and contestation, and learning and revision. The framework suggests that responsible leadership operates not as a single leader trait or ethics statement but as an organizational integrating function that shapes how decision rights, review duties, stakeholder influence, and work design are connected. Its propositions remain conditional on task characteristics, expertise, opacity, worker power, organizational readiness, and human–AI coordination. The article therefore offers a testable conceptual architecture rather than a validated causal model or universal prescription. Future research should examine whether the proposed obligations and lifecycle relationships explain differences between symbolic governance and enacted responsibility across organizational contexts. Its value therefore lies in clarifying what must be distinguished, observed, and tested when leadership responsibility is distributed through technological systems.
