Ambidextrous leadership: Opening and closing leader behaviours to facilitate idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization

The generation of ideas and the subsequent promotion and implementation of these ideas are important for organizational performance. Unfortunately, however, ideas do not always turn into innovations. Based on the ambidexterity theory of leadership for innovation, we argue that both employee idea generation and the relationship between idea generation on the one hand and idea promotion and idea realization on the other, could benefit from leaders who display both opening (fostering exploration) and closing behaviours (fostering exploitation). Results based on dyadic data (N = 201 dyads) partly supported our hypotheses, showing that opening leader behaviours were positively related to idea generation and subsequently to idea promotion and idea realization, and that closing leader behaviours strengthened the relationship between idea generation and idea realization (but not the relationship between idea generation and idea promotion). We discuss how our research contributes to knowledge about ambidextrous leadership and the relationship between idea generation and innovation.