Ambidextrous leadership and innovative work behaviors: Workplace thriving as a mediator

• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Muhammad Usman,Usman Ghani,Zia Ul Islam,Habib Gul,Khalid Mahmood
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2321

ACADEMIC PAPER

Ambidextrous leadership and innovative work behaviors:

Workplace thriving as a mediator

Muhammad Usman

1

| Usman Ghani

2

| Zia Ul Islam

3

| Habib Gul

4

|

Khalid Mahmood

5

1

School of Management, Xiamen University,

Xiamen, China

2

College of Education, Zhejiang University,

Hangzhou, China

3

School of Management, University of Science

and Technology, Hefei, China

4

School of Humanities and Social Science,

Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

5

Department of Management Sciences, Hazara

University, Mansehra, Pakistan

Correspondence

Usman Ghani, College of Education, Zhejiang

University, Hangzhou 310000, China.

Email: gusman@mail.ustc.edu.cn

Adopting the conservation of resource theory (COR) and socially embedded model of

thriving, this study examined the relationships among ambidextrous leadership, work-

place thriving, and innovative work behaviors. Specifically, we investigated both the

direct role of ambidextrous leadership in predicting innovative work behaviors as well

as the indirect role of ambidextrous leadership through the mediating process of

workplace thriving. Our results revealed that ambidextrous leadership sparks innova-

tive work behaviors among employees. Moreover, the relationship between ambidex-

trous leadership and innovative work behaviors was mediated by employee's

workplace thriving. Based on these findings, theoretical and practical implications

were discussed.

1|INTRODUCTION

In today's complex and rapidly changing business environment, inno-

vation is necessary for effectiveness, competitive advantage, and long

term survival of organizations (Amabile, Schatzel, Moneta, &

Kramer, 2004; Qu, Janssen, & Shi, 2015). The ability of an organiza-

tion to sustain competitive advantage is determined by several factors

(George & Zhou, 2001), including innovation, which is the creation

and implementation of new and potentially functional ideas

(Baer, 2012). Innovation promises organizations a competitive advan-

tage and is consequential for superior organizational performance

(Anderson, Potocˇnik, & Zhou, 2014; Rosenbusch, Brinckmann, &

Bausch, 2011). Keeping in view these and other substantial benefits

of innovativeness, factors that enhance innovative work behaviors

(IWB) are of extreme importance to be examined (Anderson, De

Dreu, & Nijstad, 2004).

Extant literature has explored numerous determinants of IWB at

the individual, team, and organizational levels (Baer & Frese, 2003;

Franco & Haase, 2017). At an organizational level, scholars have well

established that leaders can exercise their authority to introduce

novel ideas into organization directly, and support innovative behav-

iors of their followers for the achievement of organizational goals

(Harborne & Johne, 2003; Zacher & Rosing, 2015). Specifically, a list

of studies has shown that different leadership styles, such as transfor-

mational (Afsar, Badir, & Bin Saeed, 2014), servant (Yoshida, Sendjaya,

Hirst, & Cooper, 2014), and ethical leadership (Resick, Hargis, Shao, &

Dust, 2013) incite employee's to exhibit innovative behaviors. Build-

ing on these arrays of research, we aim to investigate the role of a

different type of leadership, that is, ambidextrous leadership, in

predicting IWB in a non-Western cultural context.

We focused on ambidextrous leadership to examine its influence

on IWB because the main aim of ambidextrous leadership theory is to

spur innovation at the individual, team, and organizational levels

(Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011; Zacher & Rosing, 2015). Generally,

scholars believe that leaders support to boost employee's innovative

behaviors at workplaces is quite critical, because of the complex and

nonroutine nature of IWB (Anderson et al., 2014; Kessel,

Hannemann-Weber, & Kratzer, 2012) where employee's stay away

from traditional thinking and speak about new ideas. Therefore, to

cultivate a workplace culture where employee's can generate and

implement new ideas, innovative behaviors need to be matched by an

equally multifaceted leadership approach (Zacher & Rosing, 2015).

One such matching style of leadership to employee's innovative

behaviors is ambidextrous leadership.

Ambidextrous leadership (Rosing et al., 2011) refers to “the ability

to foster both explorative and exploitative behaviors in followers by

increasing or reducing variance in their behavior and flexible switching

between those behaviors”(p. 957). Indeed, prior studies have

suggested that leaders who could fit into place in both openings

(i.e., exploration) and closing (i.e., exploitation) behaviors are more

Received: 2 March 2020 Revised: 11 May 2020 Accepted: 20 July 2020

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2321

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https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2321