Dr. Marisol Capellan’s research examines a central organizational question: What happens when responsibility remains human while consequential authority becomes increasingly distributed across people, systems, and artificial intelligence? Her current work sits at the intersection of leadership, management, organizational behavior, authority, responsibility, managerial judgment, employee voice, organizational justice, trust, legitimacy, human-AI collaboration, and the future of work.
The central framework guiding this work is Responsible Authority™, an emerging approach to understanding how organizations should allocate and exercise consequential authority when humans and artificial intelligence increasingly participate in the same decision systems. Responsible Authority™ examines five interconnected dimensions: authority, responsibility, judgment, voice, and repair. It asks who has the practical and legitimate power to decide or act, who remains answerable for the consequences, where independent human reasoning must remain, how people affected by authority can question or challenge its exercise, and what happens when a consequential decision is wrong, harmful, unfair, or contested.
A major concept within this research agenda is the Human Authority Gap, which describes the condition that can emerge when people remain accountable for consequential outcomes while lacking sufficient practical authority, information, judgment capacity, discretion, override rights, or institutional support to meaningfully influence those outcomes. This problem may arise when managers are held responsible for decisions increasingly shaped by AI, when professionals are expected to validate recommendations produced by systems they cannot fully inspect, or when employees experience consequential decisions without meaningful opportunities to question or appeal them. The Human Authority Gap is therefore not simply a technology issue. It is an organizational design, leadership, and accountability problem.
Dr. Capellan is also developing the emerging concept of Responsibility–Authority Alignment, which examines whether responsibility assigned to a human or organizational actor is matched by the practical authority, information, judgment capacity, override rights, escalation mechanisms, and institutional support necessary to influence the outcome for which that actor is held accountable. The concept remains under theoretical and empirical development and is intended to help clarify a core organizational question: Does the person who owns the consequence possess enough authority to meaningfully influence the outcome?
Through The Capellan Institute, Dr. Capellan is developing Human Authority at Work, an emerging research program focused on the changing distribution of authority, judgment, accountability, employee voice, trust, professional discretion, and leadership responsibility in AI-mediated workplaces. The program is being designed to examine how AI affects the role of managers, the quality of human oversight, employee challenge rights, decision legitimacy, and the relationship between formal responsibility and practical control.
Current research questions include what happens when people remain accountable for outcomes they cannot fully control, when AI assistance becomes substitution for managerial judgment, what makes human oversight meaningful rather than symbolic, which consequential decisions should remain meaningfully human, how override and escalation rights should be designed, how employee voice affects the legitimacy of AI-mediated decisions, what happens to managerial capability when judgment is repeatedly delegated, and how cultural expectations shape acceptance of human versus machine authority.
A central area of inquiry is managerial judgment. Managers traditionally develop judgment through experience, ambiguity, feedback, mistakes, comparison, and repeated exposure to difficult decisions. As artificial intelligence performs more analytical and judgment-related work, organizations may need to reconsider which human capabilities should be intentionally preserved. Dr. Capellan’s research examines whether repeated reliance on AI strengthens managerial decision-making, changes it, or gradually weakens the independent judgment for which managers may still remain accountable.
Another major area of focus is meaningful human oversight. A human can technically remain involved in an AI-enabled process while still lacking the time, information, expertise, confidence, discretion, psychological safety, or authority needed to challenge an automated recommendation. The research therefore distinguishes between human presence and genuine human authority and asks what conditions must exist for oversight to be substantive rather than symbolic.
Dr. Capellan’s research also examines employee voice and contestability. As AI increasingly influences decisions involving hiring, promotion, performance, scheduling, workload, discipline, compensation, opportunity, and other consequential aspects of work, employees need meaningful ways to question, challenge, and seek review of those decisions. This research explores whether people can access a human with real authority, whether new information can alter an outcome, whether escalation systems are meaningful, and whether employees feel safe speaking up.
Related work focuses on organizational trust, legitimacy, and justice. Trust may depend on whether employees understand who made a decision, whether a human reviewed it, whether disagreement was possible, whether anyone can meaningfully change the outcome, and who remains responsible. Dr. Capellan’s research considers how the visibility or opacity of authority affects trust, procedural fairness, perceived legitimacy, and confidence in organizational decision systems.
Another core area is decision rights and accountability. As authority becomes distributed across managers, executives, technology systems, organizational policies, and vendors, formal and practical control may diverge. The research examines which decisions should remain human, which may appropriately be shared with AI, which may be delegated, and how responsibility should be allocated across hybrid human-AI systems.
Leadership development is also central to this agenda. As AI performs more cognitive and analytical work, organizations may need to rethink how managers develop judgment, challenge assumptions, interpret complexity, accept responsibility, and exercise authority. The research asks which leadership capabilities should be intentionally preserved and strengthened as technology becomes more capable.
Dr. Capellan’s current research builds on a longer scholarly interest in leadership, advancement, organizational systems, institutional opportunity, and the conditions that shape access to leadership. Her doctoral research examined the trajectory of women into leadership positions and the organizational and institutional conditions affecting access, sponsorship, opportunity, and advancement. That earlier work contributed to a broader intellectual concern with how organizations distribute authority, legitimacy, opportunity, and power.
Her book, Leadership Is a Responsibility, further developed the proposition that leadership creates obligations because leadership creates consequences. Responsible Authority™ extends that proposition into a new environment. If artificial intelligence increasingly participates in consequential organizational decisions, then organizations must reconsider how responsibility should operate when authority is distributed across human and machine actors. The technology may be new, but the underlying leadership question remains: What responsibility accompanies the exercise of authority?
Dr. Capellan’s professional experience across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean also informs an emerging cross-cultural dimension of the research. Leadership, hierarchy, trust, authority, voice, and legitimacy are not experienced identically across cultural contexts. Future work will examine how these differences shape acceptance of AI authority, willingness to challenge decisions, managerial discretion, perceptions of fairness, organizational trust, and expectations of human responsibility.
The Human Authority at Work research program is being developed to include qualitative interviews, quantitative research, organizational field studies, executive and workforce research, cross-cultural comparisons, and future longitudinal study. The long-term objective is to build a body of empirical evidence capable of clarifying how human authority should function as AI becomes more deeply embedded in organizational life.
Dr. Capellan welcomes substantive collaboration with scholars, universities, research centers, and organizations working in areas such as management, organizational behavior, leadership, industrial and organizational psychology, human-AI collaboration, organizational justice, employee voice, decision science, information systems, algorithmic management, trust, and the future of work. Potential collaborations may include joint research, survey studies, organizational field research, cross-cultural studies, working papers, conference scholarship, methodological collaboration, and interdisciplinary research partnerships.
Dr. Marisol Capellan is a leadership researcher, scholar-practitioner, author, TEDx speaker, executive coach, educator, and founder of The Capellan Institute. She is a former University of Miami Miami Herbert Business School lecturer in management and organizational behavior and former Associate Director of the Master of Science in Leadership program. Her current work focuses on Responsible Authority™, the Human Authority Gap, managerial judgment, organizational accountability, employee voice, trust, and the changing distribution of authority between humans and artificial intelligence.
For research collaboration, academic inquiries, organizational research partnerships, speaking, or executive work related to this research, please contact: