When the dark core meets the digital: Toward a theory of dark digital leadership

Digitalization is transforming the landscape of leadership, amplifying not only its constructive but also its destructive expressions. Despite growing interest in toxic leadership and digital leadership, existing research has largely treated these domains as separate. This paper theorizes Dark Digital Leadership (DDL) as a multilevel, socio-technical phenomenon that emerges from the interplay between leaders' dark personality traits and the affordances of digital infrastructures. Drawing on the Dark Triad framework, Adaptive Structuration Theory, the Job Demands–Resources Model, and Upper Echelons Theory, we develop a Dynamic Socio-Technical Loop Model that explains how digital systems magnify, routinize, and legitimize destructive leadership behaviors. The framework delineates micro-level mechanisms, such as technostress and moral disengagement, meso‑level dynamics, including trust erosion and team fragmentation, and macro-level consequences, such as ethical drift and institutional instability, while identifying boundary conditions related to organizational culture, governance, and digital affordances. By embedding destructive leadership within the architecture of algorithmic organizations, this study bridges psychological and structural perspectives and contributes a socio-technical lens to understanding the dark side of leadership in the digital age.