Setting Ambidextrous Organizational Objectives

Ambidextrous leadership was defined as the leaders’ ability to foster both explorative and exploitative behaviors in followers by increasing or reducing variance in their behavior and flexibly switching between those behaviors (Rosing et al., 2011).

The construct of ambidextrous leadership has also been linked to the combination of leadership styles (Jansen et al., 2009). Leaders who are transformational encourage “out of the box thinking”, information sharing, and question assumptions. Transformational leaders promote exploration and innovative thinking. Transactional leaders focus on making incremental improvements and making the best use of the existing processes. The transactional leadership style promotes exploitative behaviors. An ambidextrous leader is able to switch back and forth between transformation/exploration and transaction/exploitation as needed, in other words, being able to switch between different leadership styles at the appropriate time, in order to foster innovation and then implement plans. Ambidextrous leadership consists of three elements (1) opening leader behaviors to foster exploration, (2) closing leader behaviors to foster exploitation, (3) and the temporal flexibility to switch between both as the situation requires (Rosing et al., 2011). Opening leadership behaviors include: allowing for multiple ways to accomplish a task, experimentation, and errors, whereas closing behaviors include; monitoring routines, sticking to plans, and minimizing errors.