In the relentless race for innovation, leadership plays a pivotal role—yet understanding exactly how different leadership styles propel creative outcomes remains a complex scientific challenge. A groundbreaking new study by Xi, Zhou, and Wang ventures into this domain with an ambitious experimental design that probes the causal relationship between ambidextrous leadership and innovation performance. Their work signals a significant advance in leadership research by deploying rigorous randomized controlled experiments, offering fresh insights that might reshuffle how organizations cultivate creativity and implementation capabilities.
At the heart of this study lies the concept of ambidextrous leadership, a style that dynamically balances two traditionally opposing behavioral modes: opening leadership, which encourages exploration and flexibility, and closing leadership, which fosters focus and discipline. Contrasting these with transformational leadership, known for inspiring and motivating followers, the authors sought to illuminate which leadership behaviors most effectively drive innovation outcomes across different stages. This finely nuanced approach addresses a gap where previous research often relied on correlational data or observational methods, leaving the causality between leadership style and innovation performance insufficiently tested.
The researchers employed a one-way, between-subjects experimental design manipulating leadership style as the independent variable. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four leadership conditions—ambidextrous, opening, closing, or transformational leadership—allowing precise control over which leadership behaviors were activated during the experiments. Innovation performance, the dependent variable, was assessed with contextually tailored metrics that reflected distinct phases of the innovation process: idea generation and idea implementation. These distinct measures provide a granular understanding of how leadership impacts not just the conception of ideas, but also their practical execution.
To ensure the study’s robustness, a priori power analysis was conducted to establish adequate sample size requirements. Leveraging established effect size benchmarks from existing literature, the team recruited 252 participants possessing relevant backgrounds in management and leadership to maximize ecological validity. After excluding two participants who could not complete both experiments, the final sample of 250 reflected diversity in gender, education, age, and professional experience. Such a carefully curated cohort not only maintained statistical power but also enhanced the generalizability of the findings across various business sectors.
Study 1 tasked participants with a creativity-driven exercise modeled from a real-world innovation program. Acting as entrepreneurial product designers, participants were challenged to conceive three novel physical products aimed at college students, constrained by factors such as retail price and product type. This design tapped into participants’ divergent thinking skills, focusing on originality and flexibility of ideas while controlling for fluency. Throughout the task, participants interacted with an assigned supervisor who dynamically adjusted leadership behaviors based on real-time progress reports via WeChat, thus emulating adaptive leadership interventions in naturalistic settings.
The leadership interventions themselves were carefully crafted, building upon a conceptual foundation rooted in ambidextrous, opening, closing, and transformational leadership theories. Using detailed behavioral descriptions adapted from prior seminal works, supervisors delivered tailored instructions responding to participant feedback, creating a responsive leadership environment. This method represents a sophisticated departure from static leadership cues, capturing the fluid nature of leader-follower interactions that shape innovative endeavors in organizational contexts.
Evaluating participants’ idea generation, the researchers utilized a multi-dimensional criterion emphasizing originality and flexibility. Given the experimental design limited the number of ideas produced, fluency was excluded from measurement to avoid confounding effects. Expert raters from diverse professional backgrounds conducted cross-evaluations of participants’ ideas, offering reliable and unbiased assessments through intraclass correlation coefficients that indicated good rater agreement. These rigorous evaluation procedures underscore the methodological sophistication of the study, ensuring that the reported innovation metrics are both valid and replicable.
In Study 2, attention shifted from ideation to implementation—an equally critical phase where innovative concepts are transformed into tangible outputs. Participants engaged in a task to improve the marketing materials of a 20-year longitudinal study, involving concrete suggestions to rectify design flaws and enhance visual appeal. This realistic challenge demanded applied creativity within constraints, revealing how leadership influences not only the birth of ideas but also their refinement and practical viability. Procedures mirrored Study 1’s dynamic intervention format, providing continuity and comparability across innovation stages.
Measurement of idea implementation hinged on two operational indicators designed to capture the utility and superior quality of participants’ outputs. Experts once again rated the work using standardized Likert scales and demonstrated excellent reliability. These indicators reflect real-world innovation success factors—applicability in practical scenarios and adherence to high-quality standards—thereby bridging academic evaluation with organizational relevance. This alignment further strengthens the study’s contribution by offering actionable insights for leadership development programs aiming to elevate innovation impact.
Importantly, participants’ perceptions of leadership behaviors were assessed post-experiment to verify the manipulation’s effectiveness. This self-report data provided an essential check to confirm that participants not only encountered but internalized the targeted leadership styles. Ensuring participants followed the intended behavioral directives lends credibility to the causal claims advanced by the study. By intertwining subjective experience with objective task performance, the researchers capture the intertwined psychological and behavioral components governing innovation under diverse leadership regimes.
The study’s findings promise to reshape established views on leadership’s role in innovation processes. Ambidextrous leadership, which deftly balances opening and closing behaviors, emerges as a particularly potent driver of innovation performance across both generation and implementation phases. This style’s adaptive nature appears to nurture the ideational creativity required to produce novel solutions while simultaneously guiding their disciplined execution into actionable outcomes. Such balanced leadership may offer organizations a roadmap for cultivating sustained innovation competence in increasingly volatile and competitive environments.
Moreover, the experimental approach marks a methodological leap in leadership research, moving beyond retrospective self-reports or correlational associations. By situating participants in realistic, interactive tasks and manipulating leader behavior in real time, the study elucidates the mechanisms by which leadership styles causally influence innovation outcomes. This dynamic perspective aligns closely with contemporary theories emphasizing processual and situational leadership, providing empirical heft to concepts that have hitherto remained largely theoretical.
For practitioners, these insights translate into tangible managerial strategies. Leaders who can flexibly alternate between encouraging exploratory thinking and enforcing focused execution are positioned to unlock their teams’ creative potential while ensuring practical deliverables reach market standards. Training interventions might thus pivot toward developing ambidextrous capabilities, equipping leaders with a repertoire of behaviors adjustable to the evolving demands of complex innovation tasks. Such targeted leadership development could ultimately drive competitive advantage through superior innovation performance.
The integration of digital communication tools, exemplified by WeChat-mediated supervisor interactions, also illustrates how technology can facilitate nuanced leadership interventions. Real-time feedback loops between leaders and employees enable tailored guidance that responds effectively to emergent challenges and opportunities—crucial features in fast-paced innovation environments. Future research might further explore how digital platforms amplify or modify leadership effects, offering fertile ground for advancing both theory and practice.
Taken together, these experiments illuminate the intricate dance between leadership style and innovation success, highlighting ambidexterity as a key enabler of creative prowess and execution excellence. This dual focus resonates with the complex demands faced by modern organizations striving to innovate continuously. Xi, Zhou, and Wang’s pioneering work thus not only enriches scholarly understanding but also charts practical pathways for leaders seeking to drive meaningful and sustainable innovation.
As innovation increasingly becomes a cornerstone of organizational survival and growth, nuanced explorations such as this are vital. By rigorously dissecting how leadership behaviors shape creativity and implementation, this research equips both scholars and practitioners with empirical foundations necessary for fostering environments where innovation can flourish. The study’s methodological rigor, combined with its theoretical richness and applied relevance, positions it to influence future research agendas and leadership development best practices on a global scale.
Ultimately, this research advances a compelling narrative: that leadership, when wielded with ambidextrous finesse, acts as a powerful catalyst transforming abstract ideas into impactful innovations. This insight beckons organizations to rethink leadership paradigms, emphasizing adaptability, responsiveness, and balance as cornerstones of innovation leadership. In doing so, it propels the discourse beyond simplistic leadership typologies toward a more vibrant, process-oriented understanding of how innovation truly happens.
Subject of Research: The causal influence of ambidextrous leadership styles on innovation performance at different stages.
Article Title: Ambidextrous leadership and innovation: a process perspective and an experimental approach.
Article References:
Xi, Y., Zhou, L. & Wang, H. Ambidextrous leadership and innovation: a process perspective and an experimental approach. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 612 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04922-9
Image Credits: AI Generated
