Ambidextrous leadership, ambidextrous employee, and the interaction between ambidextrous leadership and employee innovative performance

Abstract

Leader opening and closing behaviors are assumed to foster high levels of employee exploration and exploitation behaviors, hence motivating employee innovative performance. Applying the ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation, results revealed that leader opening and closing behaviors positively predicted employee exploration and exploitation behaviors, respectively, above and beyond the control variables. Moreover, results showed that employee innovative performance was significantly predicted by leader opening behavior, leader closing behavior, and the interaction between leaders' opening and closing behaviors, above and beyond control variables. Keywords: Ambidextrous leadership, Ambidextrous employee, Employee innovative performance BackgroundOver the last decade, there has been an enormous interest in theory and research on organizational ambidexterity. Long-term development and success rely on the organization's ability to exploit its current competencies while simultaneously exploring essentially new competencies. Organizations are constantly facing accelerating macro-and microlevel environmental changes, challenging to become dynamic and adapt to the unstable and heterogeneous context. Therefore, it is crucial for organizations to continuously adapt to external threats and opportunities and react with innovations and structural alignments. Organizational literature claimed that successful organizations within dynamic environments are ambidextrous which are aligned and efficient in the present while adaptable to future changes (Kauppila and Tempelaar 2016;Taródy 2016;Cao et al. 2009).Researchers have claimed that ambidexterity is not only a significant antecedent of innovation at the organizational level, but also teams and individual workers have to deal with the tension between exploration and exploitation to be innovative. Leadership has been considered to be one of the most influential predictors of worker innovation and organizational development (Zacher et al. 2016;Hunter et al. 2011;Bledow et al. 2009). It has been argued that leaders have to encourage both exploration and exploitation behaviors among their employees, and hence the combination of high levels of both employee Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship © The Author(s). 2018Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Alghamdi Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2018) 7:1 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13731-018-0081-8 exploration and exploitation behaviors should result in high innovative performance (Rosing et al. 2011). The ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation posits that leaders who engage in ambidextrous leadership behavior, i.e., opening and cl...

Ambidextrous Leadership in Manufacture Industry in Indonesia

“…They conclude that daily innovative performance will be highest when both transactional and transformational behaviors are high. These results are in line with the research by Alghamdi (2018), conducted in Saudi Arabia.…”

“…Previous studies on ambidextirity are mostly in the organizational context (Fourne, Sebastian, Jansen, Justin, Rosenbusch, 2016, Uotila, 2012, Kim, Bansal & Haugh, 2019, radical innovation (Blank & Naveh 2013), organizational learning (Levitt, Barbara, 2011), research and development (Swift, 2016), management systems (Burton, O'Reilly & Bidwell 2012) , and accountability (Verwaeren, Buyens & Baeten 2016) with unfortunately very limited studies of ambidextirity on leadership. The existing literature on ambidextrous leadership categorizes ambidextrous leadership into two categories: opening (exploration) and closing (exploitation) (Zacher & Wilden, 2014;Alghamdi, 2018), which we herein after refer to as tranformational leadership and transactional leadership in Indonesia. Leaders as the decision makers and are the keys to gaining competitive advantages (Solís-Molina, Hernández-Espallardo & Rodríguez-Orejuela, 2018), superior firm performance (Arzubiaga et.…”

Ambidextrous Relationships and Social Capability as Employee Well-Being: The Secret Sauce for Research and Development and Sustainable Innovation Performance

“…Managers must be responsible for coordinating HRM towards exploration and/or exploitation activities. Jansen et al [32] and Alghamdi [33] have reported that ambidextrous HRM helps to generate greater group cohesion and a more proactive attitude towards innovation.…”

Influence of the uncertainty of the external environment on the activities of the organization

“…Работы многих авторов фокусируются на влиянии неопределенности внешней среды на деятельность организации [6,7]. Учитывая, что внешняя среда изменяется достаточно быстро, долгосрочное развитие организации зависит от того, насколько она может эффективно использовать текущие и исследовать будущие возможности [8]. В разгар пандемии короновируса COVID-19 большинство российских предприятий перенесли шок от действий правительства по жесткому купированию ситуации.…”

“…Поэтому считается, что структурная неопределенность влияет на внутреннюю структуру организации, на ее реакцию на изменение внешних условий, а контекстная неопределенность -на состав и квалификацию персонала организации [8].…”