Driving Innovation in Healthcare: Exploring the Impact of Ambidextrous Leadership on Creative Performance among Frontline Health Professionals in Norway

Abstract

Background: In recent years, there has been a growing focus on enhancing frontline health professionals' ability to think and act innovatively, also known as their creative performance. However, the previous research has been limited in two ways. First, only few types of leadership styles, and their association with frontline health professionals’ capability to think and act innovatively have been examined. Second, there has been a lack of research on identifying potential process mediators and examining their role in the relationship between leadership styles and frontline health professionals’ capability. To address this knowledge gap, our study investigates the impact of ambidextrous leadership, a relatively new leadership style, on facilitating frontline health professionals' capacity to think and act innovatively (creative performance). Additionally, we explore whether frontline health professionals' learning orientation (an individual-related factor) and relationship learning (an organizational-related factor) act as process mediators between these factors. No previous research has focused on these relationships. Thus, the study offers a unique contribution to health services research. Methods: This study utilized a cross-sectional study, with a convenience sampling of N = 258 health professionals in nine Norwegian municipalities. The results of this study were analyzed using PLS-SEM, with SmartPLS 3 software. The study examined both the direct relationships, as well as indirect relationships through bootstrap. Results: The results reveal a positive link between health professionals’ creative performance and ambidextrous leadership = 0.224). Both relationship learning and learning orientation were found to operate as complementary process mediating factors between health professionals’ creative performance and ambidextrous leadership. When inspecting the strength of the two individual relationships that constitute the process mediating factors the results reveal the following: ambidextrous leadership has stronger impact on relationship learning compared to learning orientation = 0.504 versus = 0.276). However, when examining how the two factors individually are associated with health professionals’ creative performance the strength of relationship was opposite. Respectively, the findings reveal that learning orientation is significantly more positively associated with professionals’ creative performance compared to relationship learning = 0.302 versus = 0.163). In total, ambidextrous leadership, learning orientation and relationship learning explains 26% (R2 = 0.262) of the variance in professionals’ creative performance. Conclusions: This study suggest that ambidextrous leadership is capable to facilitate health professionals’ creative performance both directly as well as indirectly through the two process mediating factors, relationship learning and learning orientation. Thus, a practical implication is the importance for health service organizations to be clearly aware of those numerous of advantages that potentially can be accomplished when having leaders that are actively practicing an ambidextrous leadership style within their organization.