How Does Paradoxical Leadership Enhance Individual Ambidexterity? The Composite Multiple Mediating Role of Psychological Safety and Thriving at Work

Wang Zhaohui

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.03.008

Summary

The increasingly dynamic global business environment has brought tension and conflicts into the organizational life of employees. At the individual level, ambidexterity is the individual ability to pursue both exploitation and exploration and combine and gain synergies between them. Although researchers recognize the importance of resolving contradictory behaviors to organizational ambidexterity, most studies focus on organizational level and top management to find resolutions of tension and conflicts. At present, the research on individual ambidexterity mainly focuses on the following three aspects: the first is to explore the individual characteristics that are conducive to the integration of conflicting activities; the second is from a perspective of organizational context; the third argues that informal social networks of employees promote their ambidextrous behaviors. However, few studies have focused on the role of leadership in promoting the ambidextrous behavior of front-line employees. In the research practice, although some scholars have found that paradoxical leadership behavior can promote employees’ performance, but neglect the discussion of individual ambidextrous behavior at the micro-level. Researchers fail to answer the question of whether paradoxical leadership can promote the ambidextrous behaviors of employees. To address these concerns, this paper intends to answer the above questions from two perspectives. First of all, recent studies by foreign scholars show that paradoxical leadership includes not only performance dimension but also supportive dimension. Performance dimension means that supervisors set higher performance goals for subordinates to tap potential of subordinates, while supportive dimension refers to supervisors’ trust, guidance and assistance to subordinates. This paper examines the impact of the complementarity of performance and support on employee ambidexterity. Secondly, psychological security is an important psychological factor that affects employees’ ambidextrous behaviors based on the intrinsic motivation theory. Therefore, this paper chooses psychological security as an intermediate variable. In a recent study, some researchers point out that thriving at work impacts employees’ ambidextrous behaviors. Therefore, this paper chooses thriving at work as the mediating variable in addition to the psychological mechanism and puts forward the logic path, namely paradoxical leadership-thriving at work-employee ambidextrous behavior. Based on the data collected from a survey of 316 frontline employees, this paper uses structural equation to analyze the data. It arrives at the main findings as follows: firstly, paradoxical leadership has a significant positive impact on the ambidextrous behavior of front-line employees; secondly, the influence of paradoxical leadership on employee ambidexterity is completely through psychological security and thriving at work; thirdly, there is no significant difference in the specific intermediary role of psychological security and thriving at work, however, the individual mediation effect of thriving at work is significantly greater than chain mediation effect resulting from its combination with psychological safety. Our study contributes to the literature in two significant ways. Firstly, the paradoxical leadership is divided into two dimensions: performance and support. By analyzing the role of complementarity in promoting ambidextrous activities of employees, this paper expands the research level of traditional relationship of leadership-organization ambidexterity. It provides a new perspective for revealing the microscopic foundation of organizational ambidexterity. Secondly, through the introduction of two intermediary variables, psychological safety and thriving at work, proposes and tests a dual psychological pathway through which paradoxical leadership relates to ambidextrous behavior. As prior research has examined a motivation-based explanation, our focus on the thriving framework extends it to individual ambidexterity research and provides an opportunity to test the utility of these complementarity perspectives in demonstrating the sense of agency that provides the psychological underpinning of ambidexterity behavior.