Authentic leadership’s influence on ambidexterity with mediators in the South African context

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of a positive form of leadership, particularly authentic leadership, on ambidexterity, as ambidexterity has shown to improve financial performance. What is less clear, however, is how to create the organisational context towards ambidexterity or balanced exploitative and explorative innovation. This study set out to fill that gap in researching the direct influence of authentic leadership as well as indirect effect through innovation climate on ambidexterity. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative research approach was followed, with an online survey to employees in South African organisations. There were 733 useable questionnaires. Structural equation modelling was used to test proposed hypotheses of direct, indirect and moderation effects. Findings The results revealed that authentic leadership has a significant and positive direct effect on ambidexterity and a significant indirect effect through an innovation climate. Environmental dynamism lessened the regression weight of the relationship between authentic leadership and ambidexterity. Research limitations/implications The data collected were cross-sectional and respondents were South African employees; therefore, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other organisations in a broader African context. Practical implications Understanding that both authentic leadership and innovation climate are required to significantly influence ambidexterity allows organisations to direct their leadership selection and development. Originality/value The main contribution of this research lies in clarifying the influence of authentic leadership on ambidexterity in the South African context.

The relationship between leadership styles and organisational innovation

“…Furthermore, Zacher and Rosing (2015) recommend further studies on the impact of ambidextrous leadership on innovation performance at an organisational level rather than the team level. The role of authentic leadership in predicting innovation ambidexterity also requires further research (Scheepers and Storm, 2019). A better understanding of the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation is another future research direction highlighted by Chen et al (2018).…”

“…However, reaching this balance is difficult and is one leadership challenge. Transformational leadership facilitates radical types of innovation, whereas transactional leadership fosters incremental innovation (Scheepers and Storm, 2019).…”

“…Risk in the global business environment is continuously increasing, and a firm's ability to create an accurate market forecast is decreasing due to rapid changes and the emergence of new technologies (Fontana and Musa, 2017). Organisations are not only concerned about improving their current processes and offerings but also with finding potential opportunities for improvements that strengthen and sustain their market position (Scheepers and Storm, 2019). To improve performance continuously and remain competitive in such harsh environments, organisations must innovate and change their routines (Prasad and Junni, 2016).…”

Moderating effect of environmental dynamism on leadership practices and employees’ response to change in South Africa

“…While extant research regularly applies environmental dynamism as a moderator variable in the relationship between organisational characteristics and innovation (Chen et al, 2019;Dhir et al, 2018;Scheepers and Storm, 2018;Hou et al, 2019), the current study extends this body of literature, by investigating this moderating effect in a different domain, i.e. the relationship between leadership and employees' response to change.…”

Innovation climate mediating complexity leadership and ambidexterity

“…A scale published in Scheepers and Storm's (2018) article was used to measure organisational innovation climate. They reported high Cronbach's αs and their factor analysis revealed discriminant and convergent validity for four out of six items on organisational innovation climate.…”