Ambidextrous Leadership for Innovation: How the Dynamic Interplay of Leadership Behaviors in Teams Can Foster Innovation

• Applicant: Dr. Kathrin Rosing
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274021070

Innovation processes are complex and encompass at least two sub-processes of creativity (i.e., the generation of new and useful ideas) and implementation (i.e., the realization of these ideas). Leadership has been identified as a crucial predictor of followers’ innovative performance. However, it is unlikely that one and the same leadership style is able to support both creativity and implementation performance. Indeed, researchers have argued that traditional leadership styles are not well suited to promote followers’ innovative performance as these leadership styles disregard the complexity of innovation processes, especially the differentiation between creativity and implementation. To overcome the limitations of extant research on leadership and innovation, we developed the concept of ambidextrous leadership. The ambidextrous leadership model proposes that leaders need to engage in opening leadership behavior to support followers in addressing creativity requirements and they need to engage in closing leadership behavior to support followers in addressing implementation requirements. Moreover, leaders need to be able to show high levels of variability in their behavior as the requirements of creativity and implementation fluctuate throughout the innovation process. Recent research supports central assumptions of the ambidextrous leadership model. However, research specifically on the aspect of variability of leader behavior across situations is still scarce. In addition, an efficient and comprehensive assessment tool of ambidextrous leadership is missing. Therefore, the central aim of this project is to develop a situational judgment test on ambidextrous leadership that is able to cover all relevant aspects of ambidextrous leadership: (1) the extent that leaders engage in opening and closing leadership behavior, (2) the variability in using opening and closing leadership behavior across different situations, and (3) the alignment of leadership behavior to situational requirements. The first phase of the project will be dedicated to the development of the situational judgment test. In the second phase, we will conduct two validation studies to comprehensively validate the new instrument. We propose that an appropriate assessment tool of ambidextrous leadership is beneficial for both research and practice. First, it offers a necessary prerequisite for in-depth testing of theoretical assumptions implied by the ambidextrous leadership model. Second, the situational judgment test provides an efficient means to assess ambidextrous leadership, for example, in leadership training and/or personnel selection contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants