Abstract

Leaders must support their followers’ and teams’ innovation to maintain the competitive advantage of their organisation. Rosing, Frese, and Bausch proposed that leaders can facilitate follower and team innovation through Ambidextrous Leadership, which consists of the following subcomponents: Opening Leader Behaviour for the support of idea generation, Closing Leader Behaviour for the support of idea implementation, and temporal flexibility, that is, the leader’s ability to flexibly switch between OLB and CLB as situationally required in innovation processes. This thesis aims to contribute to the study of AL by further validating the concept and showing if and how exactly AL relates to different measures of follower and team innovation. In particular, the thesis addresses the following research needs that arise from the AL literature. First, existing studies have measured AL as the combination of OLB and CLB but have not yet specified nor measured temporal flexibility. Second, AL must yet prove that it is distinguishable from existing leadership constructs and that it predicts innovation outcomes beyond these. Third, although innovation work is often carried out by teams, evidence for the positive relationship of AL with team innovation is insufficient and mediators, which explain this relationship, remain unclear. This thesis consists of four empirical studies that address these shortcomings. In Study 1, I explored manifestations of temporal flexibility in the form of the observable Temporal Flexibility Behaviour using data from qualitative interviews. The interviews revealed manifestations of TFB through which leaders orchestrate and stimulate followers’ switching between idea generation and implementation. In Study 2, I used these findings and cross sectional data from employees to develop a reliable 6-item TFB scale, which I then combined with existing scales for OLB and CLB to introduce a conceptually complete AL measure for questionnaire based research. In Study 3, I used new cross-sectional data from employees to investigate the convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity of AL in relation to established leadership constructs and to test whether adding TFB to OLB and CLB increased the predictive power of the AL measure with regard to follower innovation outcomes. Results indicated that AL, measured with and without TFB, has convergent and discriminant validity in relation to transformational leadership, contingent rewards, Leader-Member-Exchange, consideration, and initiating structure. The incomplete measure of AL predicted follower innovation outcomes beyond the established leadership constructs. However, adding TFB to OLB and CLB did not consistently increase the predictive power of AL. In Study 4, I used cross sectional data from work teams to test if AL also positively relates to team innovation and whether adding TFB to OLB and CLB increases the predictive power of the AL measure for team innovation. I found that AL was positively related to team innovation and that adding TFB increased the predictive power of the AL measure, which shows the relevance of TFB. Team Climate for Innovation mediated the relationship. In sum, the thesis provides an extension of existing AL measures and new evidence for the validity of AL in its proposed domain of application, that is, follower and team innovation.